Make Them Pay

I love this part, she thought. Crouching deep in the black mud that always results from the children of steel tramping around in the woods, Varissa felt a tremor course along her spine to the tip of her gently swishing tail. There is nothing - NOTHING - like the hunt, and there are few prey that deserve to get killed and eaten as much as the Cheldrun.

For years the Kibara tribe had been saying there was no way the voracious Cheldrun would get this deep into the woods. There were miles and miles of woods to consume, never in our lifetimes will the Cheldrun destroy so much forest that they threaten our home - that's what the elders had said. Only a month ago the first tree fell south of Mako river. Whatever the elders say the Cheldrun have arrived. They've come leaving a swath of black ground behind them, caring only about cost. Nothing will stop them, unless we make it cost too much.

That was what the hunt tonight was about. As much as Varissa thirsted for Cheldrun blood, as much as her heart hungered for revenge, she knew that in the end, this was about survival - and the only way to survive was to make the Cheldrun pay too high a price.

The last of the smoke belching behemoths that the children of steel used to lance through whole groves of trees in one sweep came to a sputtering halt. The enormous bulbs that enable work in the evenings flickered obnoxiously, Varissa cringed, her feline eyes absorbing too much light. This was the signal for the workers to return to camp. Work for the day was done, they had devastated countless hectares - and they could have continued their devastation by night, but it had grown too dangerous.

Yes, Varissa's whiskered lips peeled back in a toothy terrifying smile, dangerous.

Out of the cab of the nearest deforesting vehicle clanked and whirred one of the mysterious half-metal men Varissa thought of as victims of some cruel experiment. The cruelty of the moment was gloriously multivalent. As he wiped his brow with a filthy towel clutched in metal pincers, he failed to realize that he was the last one out on the front. During the primary hours of work his vehicle would have been flanked with machines that spit horrible stinging metal slugs. If he had been less diligent and returned to camp a few minutes early he would have had them as an escort. If he had been running his behemoth through the denser section of woods to the east he would have made less headway. He would not have found himself plunged so deeply into the forest, away from the open territory of the expanding Cheldrun frontier. If any of these things had been different...

Being a Jevumm, Varissa, reveled in the cruelty of fate at moments like this. She sniffed the air and tasted the sweat rolling off the parts of the Cheldrun that were not mechanized, then she permitted herself a deep, trembling, growl. The man turned hastily in her direction.

The air suddenly tasted like fear.