Chapter 5: Clawless

“Get me more food,” Nazka demanded, lounging on a couch in the small common room as the furniture sagged under her weight. The cabins in the hab module were all the same size, there wasn’t much space. Each one was a rough cube that was lined with the same beige padding to protect against sudden acceleration and low-G. Nazka hadn’t tried anything funny today, but she was acting like she owned the place and it was starting to get under Eriksen’s skin.

“You already ate all of the canned meat. It would have lasted me a month, and you ate it in two sittings.”

“It wasn’t very good,” she complained, scratching absent-mindedly at the pleather lining of the couch with the claws on her paw-like feet and tearing the fabric as he watched her with a scowl. “You humans don’t know how to cook. It’s embarrassing really, it’s so dry and tasteless.”

“Feel free to cook it yourself then,” Eriksen replied, indignant. “Or better yet, fuck off back to your own ship and eat whatever it is that your kind likes to eat.”

“There’s no need to be rude. Besides, I can’t cook the way that I’d like to. You humans don’t have any condiments or oils that are used to enhance the flavors. Even then it’s not even fresh meat, it’s processed stuff, tastes like crap.”

“We have condiments, ketchup and mayonnaise, hot sauce.”

“No, I mean oils, don’t you monkeys have oils?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eriksen said, crossing his arms at her as she stared up at him with her yellow eyes. “We have cooking oil, olive oil, sunflower oil to name a few. Not on this ship obviously, this is a civilian freighter, not a cruise liner. They give me the bare minimum that I need to stay healthy, and that’s about it.”

“What a sorry existence. You spend your whole life working, and you don’t even get to enjoy any good food.”

“I could buy good food if I wanted to, I just have ... priorities.”

“Like what?” Nazka turned towards him, resting her cheek on the armrest of the couch as she waited for his reply.

“Well, I have to pay off my heavy freight license, going to school to get the certs to fly this thing wasn’t cheap. Then there’s the cost of the insurance and permits so that I can actually get it out of the docks. Conventional fuel comes out of my pay depending on how much of it I use and how conservative my burns are, same goes for avoidable damage and general upkeep. Docking fees apply if I overstay. I got fucked in taxes last year because the UN has been trying to replace us with drone ships, the crew is already down from three to one because none of the shipping companies can afford to pay us these days. On top of that, we don’t get hazard pay anymore if we have to travel to the outer colonies near Bug space, we have to prove that we were actually in some kind of danger which is basically impossible unless we have sensor data showing a fucking Bug cruiser on a pursuit vector. Then there’s all the loans that I need to pay back, rent for the apartment that I live in for the few months of the year that I don’t work, income tax. You know, the usual stuff.”

“So you live on this tin can for months at a time, and you have to cover most of the costs yourself? When do you actually get to spend any of the money that you earn?”

“The point is, buying gourmet food is low on my list of priorities because I’m a productive UN citizen and not a freeloading space pirate like you. I work for a living.”

“Sounds like you’re a slave to me. I own my ship, and I make enough to buy anything that I want. I probably only work for a few weeks out of the year. The rest of the time I’m living the high life back on the homeworld.”

“Yeah well for you, having running water and electricity is considered the high life.”

“You sound bitter, Eriksen.”

“I have good cause to be bitter, because you’re here, fucking with my livelihood. I’m going to be paying off this fiasco for the rest of my life.” He sat down heavily on a nearby chair, resting his arms on his knees as he stared forlornly at the padded carpet.

“All the more reason to come be my cabin boy,” she said with a grin, “I think you’d like the Borealan lifestyle a lot better than your human one. All you do is work all the time and you never even get to enjoy the rewards. If you’re part of a pack, then your Alpha is responsible for feeding and housing you. It goes both ways, there are benefits to being an Alpha, but there are responsibilities too. Keep your pack well nourished and strong, and they’ll serve you all the better. You wouldn’t have to worry about any of that anymore.”

“Why are you so bent on me joining your pack anyway?” Eriksen asked.

“Because that makes you my subordinate, you’d have to do whatever I said, including giving me the key code to the cockpit so that I could make off with this entire haul and live like a Matriarch for the rest of my life. Also, you give great head,” she added with a smirk.

Eriksen’s face reddened. He should have held his tongue rather than tell her how much it annoyed him when she said that kind of thing, now she took every opportunity to tease him about it.

“Why would I do whatever you said? What would compel me to do that? If it’s the threat of violence, then how would it be any different from our current relationship?”

“Because I’d be your Alpha, you’d have to do what I said,” Nazka replied. She seemed confused by the question, as if the answer should be self-evident.

“But why?”

“Don’t play dumb, your people have Alphas too, you just call them Presidents and Officers. How is your boss not your Alpha? Do you not obey him?”

“It’s not the same as what you’re describing. I could quit my job if I wanted to, I can choose not to obey, and there would be no violent consequences.”

“Maybe not violent ones, but there would be consequences. This house of cards of work and debt that you’ve built around yourself would collapse, and you’d be left destitute. You understand that it is in your own best interests to obey the orders of your employer, a Borealan recognizes that it is in their own best interests to be part of a strong pack with a powerful Alpha, same difference.”

“It’s not the same,” Eriksen insisted, glancing up to frown at her. “And fuck you for trying to make it seem reasonable when the whole goal of this pantomime is to terrorize me.”

“I gave you an out,” she sighed, turning her gaze to the ceiling. “All you had to do was cooperate, and no harm would have come to you, but you had to play the hero. This is the result.”

Eriksen stood, his knuckles white as he balled his fists, his cheeks flushed red with anger.

“So you attacking my ship and trying to steal from me is somehow my fault!? You’re a fucking pirate, I can’t trust you as far as I can throw you. For all I know, you’re still planning to harvest my organs for sale and eat the rest of me!”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” she said with a chuckle. “You’re kind of hot when you’re angry, wish you little guys had claws. I miss the way the wounds ache after a good tussle.”

“How about you pass me a knife and I’ll make do?”

“That’s the spirit,” she said, biting her lip at him.

“There’s something wrong about you,” Eriksen said, “and I don’t mean the whole sadomasochism thing. You’re an alien, why do you know English so well? Besides for the accent, you speak it like a native, and how do you know so much about human society? Just who the hell are you?”

“Very perceptive,” she replied, narrowing her feline eyes at him. “I trained to fight with humans on the Pinwheel, it’s a huge UNN Naval base. They snap up all of the Borealans that they can get their hands on and train them as auxiliaries to serve alongside Marines and Krell Linebreakers. They taught me English, and they tried to teach me how to interact with humans, but eventually I dropped out of the program and decided to make my own way in the Galaxy.”

“Why?” Eriksen asked. This wasn’t what he had been expecting.

“Because I’m not clawless.”

“Clawless? What is that? Should that mean something to me?”

“Back in Borealis’ ancient history, the lake dwellers would take slaves from the nomadic tribes that wandered the deserts. They used them as cheap labor to build their cities and to harvest their crops. To stop them from fighting back, their captors would pull out their claws, not only mutilating them but ensuring that they could never assert their status over others again. It was barbaric, it was un-Borealan. If a slave is strong enough to challenge you, then he shouldn’t be a slave to begin with. The practice was outlawed, but the term remains, a clawless person is one who is prevented from asserting himself due to outside factors. In the UNN you cannot challenge your superiors. Even though a Borealan could kill a human with a swipe of their claws, it is forbidden. Hence, Borealans who fight for humans are clawless, because your system prevents them from taking their rightful place at the top of the pack.”

“Sounds like you didn’t learn as much about humans as you think you did,” Eriksen replied. “Human soldiers earn their rank through merit and service. You have to prove that you’re fit to lead, you can’t just beat up the highest ranked guy in the room and then proclaim yourself Admiral.”

“Whatever, those auxiliaries are no different than the clawless. They have to give up everything that makes them Borealans if they want to serve alongside humans. I couldn’t do that, and so I took what I had learned and applied it to piracy, becoming the captain of my own ship and crew.”

“More like you got kicked out for being an antisocial sadist, there’s no way they’d tolerate you in the military. I’m surprised you’re not still rotting in a brig somewhere.”

“Hey, didn’t I tell you to go get me some more food?” Nazka shot back.

Eriksen shook his head dismissively, walking out of the room to search the kitchen for something that she hadn’t already demolished.

Eriksen sifted through the MREs and canned goods on the shelves in the kitchen, looking for something for Nazka to eat. She would consume about ten thousand calories in one sitting. It wasn’t hard to see where those nutrients were going, however. Nazka was enormous and maintaining her muscle mass alone probably required enough protein to choke a bear. There was more food stored in crates in the hangar bay, but he wasn’t about to break those open just to humor her.

It bothered him how normal this was starting to feel. People could adapt to almost any situation imaginable, having her live on his freighter and torment him was already beginning to seem routine. He couldn’t let that happen, he couldn’t become complacent, he had to get her off his ship one way or another. Plan C was still his best bet, he just had to find the right time to act, seize the opportunity to get that oversized gun and use it on her.

He felt a heavy hand on his shoulder, and he jumped out of his skin, dropping the can that he had been holding to clatter to the deck. Nazka leaned closer, pinching his ear in her pointed teeth and chewing it softly, Eriksen letting a gasp escape his lips as her weighty breasts pressed up against the back of his head. She could be so ... seductive when she wanted to be, not knowing when that switch would flip and she’d become a raging lunatic frayed his nerves.

“I’m hungry,” she whispered in his ear, “and not just for food. You were quiet for a while after I bit you, you were a good boy, and you did as you were told. But you talked back to me back in the common room, and I can’t let that go unpunished.”

He pushed back against her, but she pressed him up against the shelves, trapping him between the rows of cans and her massive body. She closed her arms around him in a bear hug, her chin resting in his hair, squeezing him tightly so that he couldn’t escape her grasp. Her muscles were like iron, he could feel them even beneath her leather jacket, and that was to say nothing of her copious bust. Even through the thick material, he could feel the way that her flesh deformed, spilling around his head and shoulders like melting wax.

“What are you gonna do?” Eriksen mumbled.

She slid her head down to brush her cheek against his, hovering over the gauze pad that he had used to cover the bite wound, and her serpentine tongue snaked out of her mouth. With all the dexterity of a finger, the long organ pushed under the gauze and lifted it, sliding beneath it and dragging its rough surface over the bite. Eriksen shivered, gritting his teeth against the pain. Nazka withdrew to wet her lips, keeping him pinned.