Free Marauder Ramses by Aya Morningstar Page A

him.
    “Okay,” he says, “I guess I will say it. It wasn’t all ego. Everything I said I’d do, I did. And now I say I’m going to build us a shelter.”
    I reach into my bag and pull out a rolled-up thermal blanket. It’s made of some type of nanofiber that allows almost no heat to escape.
    “Oh,” he says, “you got the blanket?”
    “What do you mean? We gathered everything we needed….”
    I look out to the sea, at the gaping hole our ship sank through.
    “Yeah,” Ramses says. “About that...I didn’t get my bag. It’s underwater.”
    “What was in your bag?” I ask.
    “All our food and water,” he says. “Good thing I’m one of the most skilled hunters on Venus, which probably means one of the most skilled in the solar system.”
    “What if there’s nothing here to hunt?”
    He points to the shrub. “There’s vegetation, so there should be animals.”
    I throw the blanket to him and he catches it. “So, you want me to cover up, huh? Feeling shy?”
    “No,” I say. “You lost all our food, and you’re probably burning even more calories to keep your big dick hard. Bundle up so you don’t have to chow down all the food we do get when we finally find something to eat.”
    “All right,” he says, pulling the blanket over his shoulders. “I’ll keep this on for now, but I won’t be able to hunt or do any real work with this thing constraining me.”
    I roll my eyes.
    “Food would be good,” Ramses says, “but it’s a luxury at this point. First we need water. I swallowed some of the seawater, and it’s fresh. It might be full of deadly bacteria that will kill me, but there’s at least not any salt in it. Unfortunately, all the water bottles and jugs were in the bag I forgot.
    “So…,” I say, “we just stay within walking distance of the coast?”
    He looks up at the sky, and we see the sun is fairly low in the sky.
    “I have no idea what the day and night cycles are like here,” he says. “Or how much colder it might get at night. Ideally, we’d find some kind of cave.”
    He looks in the direction of the mountains. They are incredibly high, and the terrain even half a kilometer in front of us begins to fill up with sharp ridges and foothills.
    He points toward one of the ridges. “Even if we can have one rocky wall sheltering us on one side, it would help.”
    As he turns to point to the ridge, the wind gusts, and his blanket blows up and exposes his chiseled ass. I stare down at it, but he doesn’t even seem to notice.
    “So water is covered,” he says, “shelter is urgent, but can wait a few hours...we need sharp sticks.”
    “Sharp sticks?” I ask.
    “We hope we’re going to have something to hunt,” he says, “but it’s also possible something will hunt us .”
    “You’re not making me feel better, Ramses,” I say. “What about the stun rod?”
    “I want to save it,” he says. “We should use it only as a last resort. By the way, what is a penguin?”
    “What?” I ask.
    “You told me to run like a penguin. I don’t know what that means.”
    “A penguin...it’s an animal. A bird. Well, it was an animal. It went extinct...but they waddled around on Antarctica.”
    “Why would it waddle if it could just fly?” he says, his ears pulling back in confusion.
    “They were flightless birds,” I say. “Good swimmers, though.”
    “Weird,” he says. “But it’s no surprise to me that a bird that couldn’t even fly went extinct.”
    We walk together to the shrub, and Ramses starts to tear off branch after branch.
    “These are too weak to be used as weapons,” he says. “We’ll have to settle for rocks. Come on.”
    He grabs my hand, and even through my thick glove I can feel his warmth…or maybe I’m just imagining it.
    We trudge through the snow, which goes up to Ramses’s knees and as far as my waist. Ramses starts to walk in front of me, cutting a path through the snow.
    “Are you seriously not cold?” I ask.
    “Cold as hell,” he