The Soul Eaters (The Thin Hex Line Book 1) by Gwyndolyn Russell (e reader txt) 📕

fence around the perimeter. It may not stop the eos from coming, but they would at least have a good warning if one snuck in. Mjolnir helped gather up extra gear. They set up camp and small supply depots in the cargo bay of the ship.

The air was safe to breathe. Surprisingly oxygen based. Reynolds had her team set up an exterior laboratory to study the eos corpse and the blob.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Fenris left within the hour. Insisted that he do his duty as he always had. Which apparently meant going into the wilderness of the unknown on a completely foreign planet we had no way of getting a topography of, nor a way of mapping without physically running around and scanning everything. Reaper saw it as an advantage and gave him one of the cartographers. As long as it was on, Fenris only had to keep it with his person. It would relay all information back to other scanners and systems that were online.

I wasn't particularly happy about him running off on his own. He said he was always sent out first as a scout. He promised to return when he finished. What condition that was was beyond me. Maybe he would come back with that artifact. Maybe he wouldn't come back at all.

No one else seemed to notice he was gone. I felt completely alone. Weird how that was. My whole life I was alone at least until I enlisted. Then I had a whole platoon for my family. Until they were wiped out by ravens. Maybe that was why I had a hard time making friends. They would all die eventually. Reaper was all I had; my only family. Fenris, too, now that I had gotten to know him. The strangest thing I had ever met; a universally feared creature grown in a laboratory, and he was a good friend who hardly left my side. I secretly hoped that this friendship wasn't something temporary. I hoped this wasn't his way of leaving me….

I kept myself busy helping set up the perimeter and made sure everyone was ready in case any eos showed up. I worked with Reaper to set up a rotation schedule so everyone could get plenty of sleep. We kept it to eight hour shifts, one group at a time. Every two hours would be a radio check. We didn't see harm in having fires as long as they were small and under control.

The first few nights we could hear Fenris out there howling. He must have been having the time of his life. Stretching his legs and moving unhindered for the first time in months. He was away from the prying eyes of humans; no one to judge that hidden monstrous side.

Then everything went quiet.

Oddly quiet. As if there were no life around us at all. No sounds of smaller critters like birds, or lizards. We barely heard the wind rustle in the trees, or the grass. The purple and pink tinges of the world replaced all the familiar greens of fauna on the ship and human favored worlds. The silence only added to the foreign feeling.

Reynolds had figured some stuff out about that weird blob on the ship. It nearly electrocuted anything that touched it, but it was only able to do that because it was eating the power the ship generated. The creature would starve without some form of electricity to eat. The nuclear core of the Syndicate was a perfect source of food for it. As much as it could gorge itself on until the uranium eroded away. The more it ate, the bigger it grew. Its tendrils sprouted thicker and grew longer. They dug further and further into the ship.

She continued to study it and figure out a way to get a sample from it. She suspected she could use something producing its own electricity. It was a device that didn’t exist. With time on her side, she commissioned Torch for the device.

After a couple of weeks, Reaper tasked me and Yaaranam with heading out into the unknown to find food. Without the synthesizer, food was going bad at an alarming rate and due to the ration, it would never be eaten quick enough. We needed an alternate source. Reaper hoped there would be something out there. He rightfully suspected there to be nothing. We had no idea if there would be animals, or non-eos life at all. The eos ate everything in sight and we suspected they were not edible at all.

We were either going to find nothing at all, eos, Fenris, or surprisingly food. Had a better chance at laying an egg spontaneously in my opinion.

We headed out on foot, each of us with a rifle, canteens, and rope.

“This is absolutely fascinating!” Nostradamus said. “To think there is life on a planet like this! The chances of it happening are slim to none. Any day now this planet could collide with another, or even an asteroid.”

I cleared my throat. “I’d rather not think about how we could die at any minute because of something like that.”

“I have to admit, it is uneasing.” Yaaranam shook her head.

"But my friends!" Nostradamus' face displayed an exclamation point. "Think of the possibilities! The truths we could discover!"

"How about we discover some fresh food?" I suggested.

"Yes, that is why we came!"

"Do you think the eos infected anything? Are they even safe to consume?" Yaaranam asked, looking up into a tree.

"Fenris eats them." I knelt down at a bush to check for berries.

"He can eat anything though."

"We will have to check any food source for foreign bacteria, nothing will be safe for your consumption without being cleaned." Nostra said.

"What about these?" Yaaranam held out a handful of white, bark-like shells. Some kind of nut presumably.

Nostradamus took one and placed it into a tray ejected from his chest. After a few minutes he cheered.

"Yes! Edible! It's a wonderful source of vitamins!"

She gathered as many as she could find.

I, meanwhile, had no luck