I'm impressed. "It's devious and practical and I love it."
She grins at me, her spirits returning. "I'll have you know, I am an excellent sidekick."
57
ALICE
We're lucky that the enemy doesn't seem to be in a particular hurry to flush us out. I'm reluctant to start on the pit traps without Sterre around, because the last thing I want is to capture my sweet, eight-legged bodyguard. Kas isn't thrilled about the delay (or about me thinking Sterre is sweet) but in the end, he agrees. We keep the rope pulled up and instead set up a couple of 'sound traps' of small objects to make noise if anyone comes close to the ship. A metal tray of pebbles perched atop the branches of the tree will make an absolute shitstorm of noise if anyone tries to climb up.
Which it does, two nights later, when Sterre returns, her neck covered in the carinoux equivalent of love bites and her mood even more affectionate than before. I'm thrilled to have her back and hug her constantly. I feel safer with her at my side. With both her and Kas? Even the bad guys don't faze me much. I'm confident we can handle everything.
We just have to stay on alert.
Kaspar starts digging the pit traps under the cover of darkness, which is another smart idea I have—that way the bad guys won't see us doing anything in the daytime, and hopefully we can sneak them under the radar. He digs all night and hauls the dirt away or spreads it out enough in nearby areas that it blends in, but the constant rain also helps camouflage things. By the time Kas has a pit mostly dug, it's a muddy, soggy mess that he has a hard time getting out of until I toss him some rope.
He also absolutely refuses to let me help, which is annoying. I can at least move dirt (or mud, as the case may be) but he refuses. I might be carrying our baby, and he won't let me lift a finger to do more than scratch at a bug bite.
Once the pit is dug, we cover it with leafy ferns and deadfall, until it can't be seen. Sterre avoids it, too. She watched us make it, so now that she knows it’s there, she skirts around it when she returns to the tree with one of her kills. Now that she's pregnant, she seems determined to shower us with meat, and day after day, we're treated to a deluge of the ugliest birds I've ever seen. Fat blueish black birds. Skinny red birds with long legs. The clawed parrots. Something pelican-like with double-wings and a crest. She drops a new one at the foot of the bed every morning, casting us disgusted looks as we wake up.
I'm convinced she thinks I'm an idiot who doesn't know how to fend for herself. She's probably right about that, too.
After the first pit is dug, Kas decides the more the merrier, and digs another. And another.
Two weeks pass.
I sew us pillows out of the bird feathers and some of the more tattered clothing. Kas works on the communication equipment in his spare time, but his focus right now is pit traps to guard our home. We have time, he says, once we know we're safe.
And every day, he asks me about my period.
Every day, I have to tell him there's no sign of it.
There's no sign of anything else, either. I've heard that pregnant women have sensitive boobs that get bigger. I've heard my appetite will increase, and I'll grow to despise certain scents. Morning sickness. Food cravings. Something that will tell me for sure, yes, you've got a bun in the oven, stupid. But there's nothing, and so I have doubts.
Kas is a big blue alien. I'm a human. We are not compatible biologically as far as I know, but every day, I'm also learning that I don't know shit about the universe. After all, I didn't know aliens existed.
Apparently, they do. Apparently, they can also make me pregnant. Either that or I've gone into very, very early menopause, but a baby seems more likely.
At least for his part, Kaspar doesn't act any different now that I'm pregnant. He's his same cheerful self, and the sex is as smoking hot as ever. I'll casually mention the farm planet now and then, and from his answers, it's clear that he has no wish to change our future plans. That means I'm going off to the alien equivalent of Kansas, and he'll go back to corsairing.
Maybe I'm an awful person, but that bugs me. If he gave me just one hint—just a tiny, tiny hint—that he wanted me to stay by his side, I wouldn't say no. After all, I've got to think of the baby. A child deserves to have both of its parents, right? So clearly we need to stay together for the child's sake.