Sounds and whispers and frightened voices issued from the shelter behind him. Kane turned, half-melted ice spilling from his fingers, and saw the flaps of the flimsy shelter open. A face appeared.

Kane couldn’t imagine what the human had expected to see, but clearly, he wasn’t it. The human shrilled out a cry and retreated, but the opening of the shelter had brought out a billow of air rank with sex musk. Kane’s whole body throbbed once in primal agony, and he sprang up and lunged for the tent.

Screams blistered his ears in the tight space and one or both of the humans was slapping at him, but Kane was beyond caring. He caught one by the arm, the other by the hair, and dragged them both out into the light. The one he had by the hair he sent to the ground and stepped on it to keep it still. He pulled the other up and ripped its lower clothing off with one pass of his claws.

It was male. Kane’s frustrations boiled briefly over and he threw the human with all his considerable strength and fury into the nearest tree. There was a sound like a whole handful of dry branches cracking all at once, and the human tumbled facedown into a bush and lay still.

The human under his foot was screaming. Kane pulled it to its feet and tore its clothing away. This one was female.

He pushed her to the ground, fighting her the whole way down and reminding himself not to kill her, not to kill her. She must have known what was coming, because it took real effort to wedge his knee between her thighs and pry them open, but once that was done, he had only to open his own coverings and let his aching cock spring free. The human’s cries became a glass-shattering shriek when Kane shoved inside her, but that was easily ignored. The only thing that mattered now was this, this bliss. The human’s oils, fresh from her own mating, were already interacting with him, producing the first spurt of quick-cum and easing the hellish pressure that had built in his tsesac all day.

Exhaustion fell over Kane, leaden and dry. He put a hand over the human’s mouth to muffle the shrillness from her cries and let his head droop until it touched the ground above her shoulder. His mind went grey even as his body drove itself robotically to frenzy.

Kane dozed.

And overhead, unseen by him or his struggling captive, visible only as a streak of silver against the brilliant blue of Earth’s sky, a Jotan ship broke into the atmosphere and arced around to land.

*

The Human Studies scientist was right: The Far-Reacher’s records were painfully dry reading. When Tagen got back to Jota, the first thing he intended to do was go to the nearest jeweler and have a Crimson Sun discretely replicated. Then he would go home, give himself the medal in acknowledgment of the terrible injury he was doing to his brain by boring it to death, drink three or four bottles of ul, and see if he could catch a whole night’s sleep in his own bed without being promoted.

Tagen had interrogated several recovered humans in the course of his career, and he considered himself something of authority on them. This was to say that he knew if one hit them very hard, they’d break, and if one fed them perfectly good shar inu’u, they’d die. He knew how to tell the genders apart without stripping them completely naked, he knew the ratio of male-to-female was almost even, and he knew that they had an unnatural obsession with keeping their own offspring. He also knew that they could not be trusted, that even a young one would try to attack if it had the opportunity, and that they were incapable of understanding the difference between a slaver and an upstanding Fleet officer who was trying very damned hard to help them. In Tagen’s opinion, this was the only practical information one should learn regarding humans.

The Far-Reachers, on the other hand, had been far more concerned with Earth than with the creatures that evolved there. Indeed, when they had first discovered the world, it took several years before they even realized there was a sentient species occupying it. But of course, by the time the Gate was built, they’d already learned that ‘sentient’ was really a relative term. Back then, the humans were scattered, squabbling beasts without a common leader or even a common language. They warred over everything—over land, over food, over water, over trade routes, over politics, over religion, over nothing at all. Their capacity for destruction was astounding, even with what crude weapons they’d had.

Tagen could have told them that. He’d seen a human, one maybe ten years old, leap on a full-grown Fleet commander and do its level-best to knock him senseless with a rock no bigger than its own little fist. It had taken three officers to pry the beast off him, and another two to get the rock away. Funny as hell, really, but it had a way of being less funny the more humans (and the more rocks) happened to be in one’s line of sight.

The Far-Reachers came to the same conclusion. After a few years of study, the planet was officially declared hostile and the Gate abandoned. Only abandoned. It was far too expensive a thing to detonate, and anyway, in a few thousand years, the humans might be sufficiently advanced for a second chance at contact. Such was the thinking at the time.

Naturally, as soon as the scientists left, the slavers came. But the distance between Jotan space and Earth, not to mention the difficulty involved in sneaking through the Gate (abandoned didn’t mean necessarily ignored), was discouraging to most slavers. The humans were able to swarm around unmolested for the most part, breeding virally until now, centuries later, when there were gluts of them and it was discovered that for all their inferiority, the human brain made some damned good Vahst. So it was here that E’Var and others like him came for a little quick work and a lot of profit.

The console before him sounded an alert, advising Tagen in its uninflected tones that the Jota Prime Gate was approaching and first-rank codes were required before coordinates would be accepted. Almost as an afterthought, the computer reminded Tagen that all unauthorized ships would be terminated mid-Gate.

This raised an interesting point, Tagen thought as he complied. Where did the criminals who trafficked in Earth-caught humans get their Gate codes? They were changed nearly every day, and no one apart from first-rank Fleet commanders or council members ever had access to them. If technology existed that allowed a slaver to decode transmissions undetected, then the So-Quaal surely were providing it, for all their assurances of neutrality.

The codes were accepted, an ironic reminder that Tagen was neither first-rank nor sitting on the council, and yet here he was, watching the Jota Prime Gate power up to admit him. He felt the sickening lurch as the Gate gripped him, and then he was pulled forward and into the dizzying spray of stars that lit up all the fathoms of folded space between two worlds. The star cruiser, its engines sleeping for the jump, began to vibrate and then to buck. Tagen heard a low, anguished groan rattle its way through the whole hull, and he had just enough time to calmly think that he had solved the mystery of E’Var’s disappearance and was, in fact, about to be spread across the same corner of the galaxy, when he suddenly punched through the glowing Gate and into Earth-space.

Immediately, his audio channel erupted into an incomprehensible mass of noise. Voices, music, klaxons, static—all of it crashing senselessly together at a deafening volume. Tagen switched off the audio feed at once, and then leaned back in his chair and wondered just how the humans were transmitting at all.

The Far-Reacher’s records, which he had been reading as he listened to his N’Glish language discs, had been very clear on the point that humans were in their technological infancy. At the time of the quarantine, only a few of their hundreds of civilizations had even mastered the process of alloyed metals. To broadcast sound into space required transistors and electricity at the very least.