The boarding hordes snarled and snapped at each other as their God Kings herded them from the lighters and down into the storage bowels of the still forming globe. From one or another of the confused and frightened normals crocodilian teeth lashed out whenever followers of a different Kessentai came in range. Sometimes the needle-sharp rows of teeth drew yellowish blood and scraps of reptilian flesh before their wielders were lashed back to passive obedience.
Not for the first time, Ro'moloristen felt his own bile rise, his crest expand. Half of this was the result of dim, presentient memories of his own time in the breeding pens, a time of constant struggle and fear of being eaten alive by his siblings. The other half was more pungent.
The normals tended to lose control when upset or frightened. The crude loading and unloading, coupled with the strangeness of space flight, was more than sufficient to upset most of them and to actually frighten many, even as dull as they were. The result of that fear was a stench of carelessly dropped Posleen feces wafting up from the depths of the lighters to fill the air. In that section of the globe the loading of which it was the young God King's task to supervise, the stench was overpowering to the extent of being sickening. Still, he thought, normals are so cute, so desirable. But they are so untidy.
Somewhat less bothered by the stench they lived with daily, the cosslain—the superior normals—flanked the procession, keeping a modicum of order. Keeping order among the normals was half the reason for the flanking procession. The other half was to carry and load aboard ship individual weapons with which the normals could not be trusted entirely, aboard ship, given the stresses those normals were under.
A Kenstain20 appeared at Ro'moloristen's shoulder.
The God King gestured and a hologram of the globe appeared in midair. He gestured, again, with a claw and a section of the hologram, plus a route leading to that section, suddenly glowed brighter than the rest. "Guide this group down to here and get them into the stasis tanks," he ordered.
Athenalras held fiefs on nine worlds. The first, despite a major evacuation of the People, was already plunging itself into Orna'adar, the Posleen Ragnarok. This was the last to be loaded. From here the People would move to the new world, the one they called "Aradeen," though the locals called it "Earth."
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