Post by brank on Feb 8, 2023 5:31:22 GMT
Hyperspace - En route to Imperial Territory
The Fighter had lept from the system like a frog leaping across a pond in fast-forwards, lunging forwards and into Hyperspace. The fighter's thin, black frame was bathed in the soft glow of purples and blues, streaking past a million trillion lights, white and blue, and many other hues; the floes and clouds of hyperspace were beautiful to some, and a pointless insanity to others. Behind the fighter trailed blood-streaks of red plasma from the Kestrel's fusion torches. With closer inspection, one could see the vague figures of two people, one tall and armoured, the other short and bubbly, through the faint glow of the kestrel's internal redlights. Granted, if anyone could be watching to begin with.
Ever since the jump to hyperspace, Happosei Kozakana-2230 and Jaren Galve- no longer a Private (Second Class) -had been mostly silent. The trip to the High Imperium wouldnt be long- an hour at most -and they had been quietly watching the stars pass by for half an hour. Galve's arm was still held tightly around Kana's, as she sat upon his lap. His breathing was slow; methodic and in tune with the pseudomechanical breaths that Kana too took, an odd and calming rythm kept between them for so long. Galve yawned quietly, the first noise other than the quiet sounds of the hyperdrive and the engines in a long while. Breaking the ice- no -the warm barrier between them, Jaren spoke; his voice was soft yet gruff- tired.
"Hey, Kana..." he spoke first, lifting his hand off of the neon-red amoeba's back. "Is everything okay, you awake?"
Reaching, he pulled off the armour of his gloves, laying them to the side, then pulling away the gloves themselves. He flexed his fingers, letting them take in the air for the first time in quite a bit. He mumbled to himself about it being 'much better..' and leaned back in the pilot's chair once again, looking down at 'kana. Her Red frame was bright against the vivid colours of FTL outside of the canopy, and accentuated by the glowing red lights of the cockpit's instruments. A smile was brought to Galve's face, as he offered a few tentative pats upon the sodalyte's shoulder.
"You said you wanted to talk, yeah?" he asked, sighing. "I think I need to, as well..."
The Sodalyte drone stirred, and then jolted awake - a flash of sapience sparkling along her left eye. Her only eye - big, and round, and edged with a sharp, black mono-lash. The socket where the other should have been was smooth, but she'd covered it with a liquid 'bang' of gooey 'hair'. Her cutesy little cheeks alit with color, the insides of their spots filling to a rich pink, and she rose up off Jaren's chest with a squiddy murmur of liquid disgruntlement.
"Talk," she repeated, sucking in a breath of the cabin's atmosphere and filling herself with bubbles of the stuff to get her streams moving. "I... Yes, that's a good idea."
The little biot sat there for a moment, unsure of what to think about Galve's shoulder-pats, and looked down again as her gaze drifted off into space.
She couldn't tell him why she'd been there.
She couldn't tell him that she was the one who started that war. She was the one who planted evidence, who set up false casus belli for the itchy trigger fingers of the Yyroid natives and the Dominion. She didn't build the foundations, but she sped the process along and made it a hundred times worse than it ever should have been - and now here she was, sitting in a ship with one of the very men she'd doomed all those months ago, still trying to understand how it had come to this.
"Why don't you talk first?" She looked up again, tried to meet his eyes, and found that her body wouldn't let her. Instead, she opted to look out the window: obscuring her eye from his view as she turned.
"I... I-I'm still not sure how to talk about things, for myself. ...A-Apologies."
That excuse would wear thin in time, but for now, it worked.
"Me, talk?" he said, raising an eyebrow and his smile fading slightly. "Fair enough, I guess. Where to start though?" he mused, the last part mostly spoken to himself as he pondered, turning to meet eyes with the soda to no avail, as she had already turned her bubbly head. Galve thought for a moment more, his brows furrowing.
"Well, to start... I'm from the place we're headed to. The High Imperium, Zapoth. I was seventeen when the Legionaries came to my door to conscript me. I... Didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to any of my friends, let alone the one family member I had left. No time to take any of my belongings, so I dont have anything left besides a photo i have folded up in one of the pouches on my armour. My mom..."
He paused, wincing as he too stared out the window of hyperspace. So little had been said, yet an ache already lingered at the edges of his being, a longing to cry, as tears threatened to overflow. Despite this, he carried on in defiance and kept them held back, for now.
"She was already dying when they took me. It felt like she died the day they did, and at this point i've accepted it as if it were fact... Wouldn't be surprised. No-one to care for her, and the government wont do shit for her, never wanted to from the start. Fucking noble pricks." he continued, a hint of anger mindling with the sadness, pushing the tears back a while longer.
He continued, still staring off into the colourful void of hyperspace as he curled his lips in disgust. "I was seventeen years old when they took me. I turned thirty a month ago. About two or three years into the conscription, I got shoved onto a fleet leaving the galaxy, the universe we know. Back to one that the Imperium used to call home long before Ancerious. There, the Dominion happened, and i got stuck in conscription again because they were fighting a losing war against some people the noble assholes had a grudge with. Bastards live for forever, so of course they have people they still hate from some ancient homeland we havent seen in forever."
"Then, the Dominion somehow had their capital planet, which just so happened to be the terraformed ancestral home of my people, brought back to this galaxy. Still confuses me how it happens." he said with a smile, almost having forgotten about the sodalyte. Almost. He turned his head back down to look at her, and laid his hand beside where she sat, facing upwards, almost as if offering it to her. His voice broke ever-so-slightly, and a tear ran down his cheek as he finished his thought: "But.... I-I'm glad I did make it back to this forsaken galaxy. It's bearable, with y-you in it.."
He smiled sadly, and spoke to her.
"Thats the best I think I can do for now."
he paused, and frowned.
"I-I... Don't think I can bring myself to talk about the awful things that happened; the awful things I did on that planet. I can't put it into words. Are you sure there's nothing for you to say, Kana?" he asked, waiting for the sodalyte's response.
Kana listened to Galve's story carefully, and she tried to rationalize it in her own mind.
She knew what being forced into this line of work was like. She knew that too well, in fact: but she didn't know what a 'mom' was. The Sodalyte couldn't realistically understand his attachment to such a person, because she didn't understand sex, and didn't understand parenthood, and didn't understand biological caretaking: but she did know how it felt to see people die. So she nodded silently, rubbing her shaken companion on the shoulder as he continued.
She knew exactly what it was like to get dragged into a war so long and esoteric that nobody knew why it was fought anymore. If anything, she found herself surprised that Jaren treated it so bitterly: because for her, things like that had always been a fact of life. She blinked, looking curiously out into the depths of space as he finished, and gave the cockpit a few moments of respectful silence.
"...You're a good mix, Jaren."
She smiled in an unusual way, placing one of her hands atop his. "The Universe has taken a lot from you. After all that suffering, I think you should feel proud that you're still... ...a good person." The Sodalyte fingered the loaded pistol stored within her right thigh, rubbing along the top of it silently. "A good person," she repeated with more conviction, looking up into his eyes again. "And, as cruel as it may be to say..."
Kana looked down, letting her expression soften. "...I'm... happy those things happened to you, in a way. Because of that, I got to meet you. Now, we get to put those things behind us. Both wouldn't be possible without that suffering, but then, they wouldn't be necessary either."
She frowned, her eyebrows creasing and cheek-spots losing saturation. "...So why does that possibility seem so... ...Not sad. Bad word. It's happy in some ways, but sad in others? Like..." She pantomimed something drilled into her chest with a twisting finger. "Like removing a bullet from your membrane. It's bad to have it there, but it feels strange and empty for a while when you still remember it being there."
Kozakana slumped a little, folding her fingers in her lap, and looked down at them sadly.
"Maybe I would've been happier about my life, too, if I weren't.... weren't ordered out there. No, not maybe. I would've been. Even if I died in some pointless attack on my home city or got decommissioned for one too many slip-ups, or just lived long enough to be fully recycled, I think I really would've been happier. I wouldn't have had to.. t-to kill..."
She shuddered. "...To kill so many... so..... s-so many M.. M-Mul... People." She forced the word between her lips, clenching them viciously to catch it in the act of transforming. "To kill. So. Many. People. Like you, or me, or any of the other Happoseis I knew back home."
"But then," and she looked up and gave a trembling smile that threatened to break, "I wouldn't have met you either, achy bullet."
Galve nodded quietly, letting the words of the sodalyte sink in for a while.
"I.. I'm sorry." he softly spoke, offering a sad smile in return, his eyes looking down from the window, and into the eye of the Happosei. "To kill is... Arguably, one of the worst feelings. Taking away the life of someone, let alone... s-someone you knew," his voice shook, the smile he had fading away again as he turned his head away, another drip of salty tears streaming down his face as he threatened to break.
"Kana, I-"
He was cut off as the plane beeped at him, a holographic form appearing in-between the two. The hologram was a burnt-orange colour, in the shape of a short man- only six inches tall- with a large jacket and baggy pants, hands shoved into the pockets of the former. His hair was short, and slicked back, and his face was sharp. On the floating man's head was a seemingly out-of-place cowboy hat, worn loosely and partly sideways.
"Sentimental time is over, Kiddos. We're boutta' leave hyperspace in thirty seconds. Brace ya'selves."
The orange man was facing towards galve, and hovered around in the air to look at the sodalyte, offering a huge smile. "I ain' seen much like you before, Red. Kana, is it?" he questioned, sitting down in the air between them with crossed legs, the hat fizzling away into nothingness.
Galve let out a deep sigh, but wasnt given the chance to speak.
"M'name's Revo, and i'm the artificial intie hooked to this rig. Till you ditch this ride, I'm stuck with you" the AI spoke, leaning back against blank space as if a wall were behind his form. "Unless, of course, you bring me along with you!" he exclaimed, smiling wider and scratching at the back of his head.
"We'll take you with us, but could you not have introduced yourself Beforehand?" galve replied, frowning.
"Nah, had ta' give you kids time to be sad. Woulda been rude to just barge in without good reason, dontcha think?"
Before Galve could reply, hyperspace was drained of all its colour, the fighter lurching sharply as it was pulled into realspace over their destination by the gravitational well of a planet, or maybe an interdiction field. Stars twinkled in the purplish-black of space around them as a planet came into view, brown-and-green with small pockets of muddy blue on the backwater world of Zapoth. Some small-scale traffic went back and forth between stations and the surface, but overall it seemed like a dead system, outside of a small fleet of white-and-purple warships, massive in scale, hovering above the world.
"Save yah words, Jaren. Better get this baby landing."
Kozakana's head did a full 180 on her shoulders at the abrupt noise. She glared at the little space-cowboy with a confusing stare, trying to scan her eyes across the form and seemingly read him until he started moving. At that, she crawled up onto her knees and sort of awkwardly shuffled around until her plump legs were sat the same way as Galve's - her head against his chest and under his chin.
"Happosei Kozakana-2230," she coldly reported, staring at the thing with tremendous suspicion. "And I think discussing your route with the pilots of your ship is an extremely 'good' reason. What..."
She waved a neon-red hand through the image, scowled, and then jammed the thing into her head; its membrane merging through the rest and intersecting in a surreal way. "...What is happening?" She demanded, flicking her gaze around the cockpit. "I'm not receiving any Loud Weapons through my osmotic processes. Jaren, what is this th-"
And then spacetime's ragged smear resolved into an inky night. Kana tensed up, wincing at the sudden jolt, and went wide-eyed.
"Jaren?"
She got up on her knees again and pressed her face to one window, staring intently out into the night. Through the almost-opaque blur of her liquid, he could see her cheek-spots draining to a warm white.
"Whose ships are those?"
After the jump-sequence was finished, Jaren moved his hands around the sodalyte's small body and grabbed onto the controls of the Jet, pushing the engines into a full burn as he shot forth towards the planet. With a strain, he replied to her- "Imperials."
The AI finished Galve's thoughts, and answered the sodalyte's question from before the jump ended.
"Them ships belong to the High Imperium, massive sunnuvabitches, they are. Probably filled with a crew of slaves and led by some Dreftallech asshole at the helm of the cruiser there. So long as you land real quick and abandon the fighter and your armour, we should be good. Oh, and by the way miss, I'm a hologram. Made out of a projection of light. My real body is inside the fighter, just a datacore. Can chip it and bring my personality with y'all, but most of my processing power will be left behind."
Galve nodded as the AI spoke as to confirm what he said, but focused on getting the fighter out of danger. The Imperials tried to hail the speeding craft, but found it had no radio. Their massive guns turned to fire, but by the time they did, the fighter was already streaking through the atmosphere of the planet.
"Revo, why dont you land this thing!? I'm not a trained pilot!" called out galve, waiting to let go of the controls with a wince in his voice.
"Bah, fine. Cant do nuthin' yourself now can ya?" the AI replied, dissipating away as the ship began to move itself, heading for a backwater city on the backwater planet, the whole body of it shaking as if it were going to fall apart. Without waiting, Galve pulled away from the controls and instead elected to pull the sodalyte close to his chest, clearly fearful of the violent atmospheric re-entry; although, probably more worried about Kana being hurt than anything else.
"Hold on kiddos!" yelled Revo, laughing loudly over the fighter's speakers.
And hold on Galve did indeed.
"Slaves?" Kana rolled the word around on her tongue, looking confused. "What is that? Slave. And the Imperium: who are they? I was never really told about them—only the Dominion..."
The Sodalyte quieted herself down at Revo's explanation, but she only seemed more confused. Kozakana leant forward, tapping the light with one finger, and scowled at it. "But that doesn't make sense," she muttered, waving her clear fingers through his 'body'. "How is it constrained to just-?"
She poked at the thing as they descended, alternating between examining the enemy ships—specks as they would be to anything but the enhanced views of the ship's optics—and harassing Revo's projection. She seemed to grow more and more uncomfortable as the ship started shaking, gently pulling herself into a balled fetal position atop Jaren's lap. She hugged herself tightly, burbling in dangerous tones as she saw the world starting to burn around her, and leant into Galve's embrace like he was her only lifeline.
It almost sounded like she was whimpering in bubbles and warbles. While Galve held on, Kana seemed to try and make herself as small as possible - her one eye wide and terrified at the sight of the searing heat around them.
Had she ever actually seen re-entry before, let alone experienced it this viscerally? It was like this was her first time doing anything of the sort, even after spending so much time on Yyro after her presumable landing.
Galve gritted his teeth, tensing up as he held the sodalyte close.
"The High Imperium.. My home. My birth-nation. I'll tell you more late-"
He was cut off as the fighter jolted, slowing down as the nose tipped up sharply to work as a giant airbrake, dropping the craft's speed significantly as they got ever closer to the ground, sprawling dirty cities of curved purply and white buildings interspersed with crowds of commoners crawling around in the wide slums. Galve gulped, and tried to continue talking.
"Kana... Slaves are..." he paused, thinking of what to say as he whispered near the sodalytes ear- not daring to get louder, maybe out of freezing fear or a want for the AI to not hear him..? "...a slave is someone, a living-breathing being with sapient thoughts, who is treated like nothing but property; nothing but a tool. Be it for work, entertainment, sacrifice, or..." he cringed, "...nevermind, you'd not get it. Either way, it's an awful practice."
Galve let out a deep sigh as the Kestrel no longer shook, the AI controlling it down towards the ground as a large patch of dirt called a landing strip came into view, the VTOL engines coming to bare as the wings pointed down, shoving exhaust and jet-trails downwards to the ground as a cloud formed around them. The plane hit the ground with a mighty, bone-shaking thud as the systems began to power down; the cockpit cracking open slightly as galve loosened his grip on Kana.
"Alrighty, we've hit sweet sweet land, lil'uns. Hop out whenever you'd like, and dont forget to grab my core out of the dash before you go."
Revo dissapeared, and from the dashboard of the cockpit, a small cylinder turned and ejected out, revealing a cylindrical red-glowing device that seemed to shoot with energy inside it-
Revo's datacore.
As the aircraft’s turbulence slowed and settled, the Sodalyte released from her fearful grip. Slowly, carefully, she got up; still shivering just a little. A hesitant hand found its way onto Galve’s shoulder, using him for support as she sat up crosswise upon his lap. Strangely, however, she didn’t look relieved.
If anything, she looked… strangely empty.
“A living, sapient person; who is treated like property.”
She stared down at her free hand, the palm open, and clasped the fingers shut around an invisible needle-point. Kana smiled sadly, looking up to Jaren, and spoke with a melancholic quiet.
“It sounds just like home,” she realized; looking down again as the Kestrel’s systems slowed and landed them on the dirty field.
“…Just like how life was, there.”
She plucked the core from the console, turned it over a little to examine the thing, and then palmed it to Galve—disinterested and disheartened. She looked out on the strange sky and fauna of a new world, and yet, that same curiosity she’d had in space had vanished. Now, she had a kind of resolute countenance—as if she were waiting for a familiar hammer to drop.
“You don’t need to explain any more, Achy Bullet. I believe I know what that word means now.”
Galve nodded in understanding, and placed his hand on the Core. Grabbing it from the sodalytes hands, he grabbed his gun from the side of the cockpit, and popped the lid of the craft fully. With a hiss, the atmospheres equalized, and the ladder began to set down from the cockpit with a quiet whirr. Jaren's armour clacked against itself as he heaved himself out of the seat and onto the ladder, before offering a hand to Kana.
After they had hit the ground, the first thing he did was start tugging at the metal that covered him, plate-by-plate. First the shoulderguards hit the ground, then the gauntlets and kneepads. Piece by piece the metal fell to the ground, finally ending as he tugged the heavy metal-and-cloth chestplate over his head and threw it to the ground. In the end, all he was left with was the black jumpsuit below his armour, some garments in the way of gloves and some velcro-pouches for ammo he had ripped off his chestplate, and finally, the metal railing slung over his back that held his rifle.
In his hands was his knife, and the core; the latter of which he held back out to the sodalyte. Finally breaking the silence, he spoke out.
"Kana, you think you can keep this in a bubble? Think it'd be safer than me holding onto it."
Kozakana let off a liquidy pop when the cockpit opened, the bubbles inside her rushing, swirling, and then equalizing in a new pattern. She clambered over to the side of the Kestrel’s cockpit, seating herself on the edge without a shred of concern, and watched curiously as he peeled the armor layers back.
“Human armor is very complicated,” she observed, gently taking the AI’s core and eying it quizzically. She clasped a clawed hand around the thing, winced, and grimaced; pooling a bit of her membrane into a liquidless bubble of air surrounding the thing. She took a moment, panting, and then stuck a finger in; drawing up a stream of bubbles and popping them out of her mouth. As she did so, the surface rapidly shrunk—leaving a vacuum-compressed, waterproof skin over the thing. She eyed it to make sure it was secure, nodded, and popped it in her mouth—shoving it under her collar with a gulp of fluid.
“It’s secure,” she reported, leaning slowly back over the cockpit and looking down. She examined the featureless dirt for a bit, looked back up to Jaren, and snapped something halfway between a human salute and a human wave.
“See you on the ground, ex-private.”
She then promptly tipped over the side, crashing onto the runway. There was an audible warble, crash, and splat as she hit the dirt, but after a brief stint, the vibrations had settled. She sat up, dusted herself off, and stood—tapping the soil with one foot.
“The terrain is safe,” she reported, making that strange pinch-and-pull gesture that he was coming to understand as a ’come here’. “It’s alright to come down.”
Galve shook his head, smiling as he climbed down the ladder, placing a foot on the ground, protected only by leather wraps that had been under his armoured boot, shooing away some rocks from under where he stood.
"Alright, we're planetside. Let's get the fuck out of here before people start swarming..."
Before they could stick around very long, Galve nodded towards the Sodalyte, and began walking. They werent very far from the slums of a grandiose city of whites and purples, presumably the capital of the planet. They stepped through side-streets and alleys for some time, the fighter left behind for passerbys to mess with. Galve eventually held out his hand near the edge of a street, keeping them inside an alleyway.
"Here's a good place to stop, and go through our options" he suggested, letting out a breath and leaning against the metal of a seemingly hastily produced slumhouse, the dirty white looking closer to a light brown and the purple highlights scuffed and discoloured.
"We both need new clothes, first off," pointed out galve, tugging at the nearly-skintight jumpsuit he wore, and flicking his eyes to the more liquid-gel jumpsuit of which Kana wore. "Then we need to eat something, and get some sort of ride off this planet, preferably one we can keep for ourselves."
"So, Kana, what first?" he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly as he waited for her response.
Kana peered eerily through the darkness, having changed back to a muddy mix for the time being. Dressed only in a patchy and slightly ripped black jumpsuit, she blended too dimly into the shadows: a stark darkness against her freakishly bright surroundings.
She flicked her one eye to Galve’s face, scanned across the street for a moment, and then muttered a decision.
”Primary objective is to blend in,” she observed, gesturing out to the local architecture. ”Overall operations will be significantly easier with basic disguises and regalia. I don’t suppose there are fashionable varieties of helmet or mask on this planet…?“
She tapped a foot on the ground, frowning deeply. ”That, or we play the slave angle. I find ragged clothes and manacles, and you dress abnormally well. Either way, a disguise is good. Necessary.”
But why did she need one? She herself didn’t seem to question the automatic assumption, taking it as a fact as she looked carefully over their surroundings.
Galve peered around the corner, looking about the crowds, particularly their clothing. His brow furrowed as he went deep into thought, listening to Kana intently.
"Hm. Helmets arent a commonality, no. Either way,- no offense- but with how alien you are, the latter will work a lot better, and fool people. Only thing we'll have to worry about is maybe some sickos trying to buy you, n' I can tell them to back off. Only issue is how we're supposed to find fancy clothing for me to wear..."
He slipped his hand into a thin pocket on his jumpsuit, pulling out a small, thin bar that when pressed, popped out a red hologram- some sort of Digital wallet.
"I still have the SIGEC from my military paycheck, looks like they havent thought to take it. If we can find what we need to begin with, I can probably buy it."
He eyed the area around once more, looking towards the more crowded areas, nodded towards something. From a fancier looking building, a tall man in flowing white-purple robes with coppertoned skin and long black hair stepped out of a building, clean and pristine, as if the robes were fresh from a tailor.
"Maybe we can get something there," he said, turning back to Kana as an idea popped into his head. "Alright, so. If you can slip back into the slums, steal some discarded rags, and maybe some rope or metal chain, and meet me back here, I'll head in and get the clothes I need. From there, we can walk about without much worry, and get everything else we need."
He thought again for a moment.
"I'll see about getting some clothes for you to get into while im there, you can put them on once we've made it out. Until then..." Galve placed a hand on her shoulder, and gave a gentle shove, then smiled warmly. "Stay safe, and i'll meet you back here when im done."
Without waiting very long, he stepped out of the alley, and headed down the road to the shop he'd seen the noble exit, cautiously looking around him constantly.
Kana stumbled a little at the shove, a strange expression on her face—but she soon realized the meaning of the gesture and softened into a smile. The Sodalyte flipped a faux wave, nodded to Galve, and turned about: walking deeper into the alleyways.
In the darkness, the drone was a silent menace. Save the soft crackle of her bubbles, she tread lightly and flexibly—swerving around garbage and debris like it was of no consequence to her. She climbed up walls, peered through windows, and examined air-drying clothesracks in the crack between the buildings until she found a suitable target.
An old woman, slumped against a brick wall and an old man.
The Sodalyte warped her body down the wall like a jelly gecko, her limbs stretching and compressing in unnatural ways. Without a second thought, she stuffed her hand over the woman’s mouth and shoved her fingers into her nostrils; muffling her instantly. She struggled and tried to beat the Sodalyte off of her, but Kana implacably stared at her—simply resting her one eye around the woman’s hands in case she grabbed a bladed weapon. It never came, however, and she slumped over - having asphyxiated into unconsciousness.
The Sodalyte pulled the torn clothes off of her back like a fallen mannequin, examining them carefully. After a bit of calculation, she investigated both the woman and the man’s pockets to see if they had anything she could use as a cutting instrument.
Bingo: the man had a pocket knife. Flicking a few lumps of decaying grime into the alley’s darkness, Kozakana got to work: trimming the cloth to her own specifications. Once she was done, she gripped the surface of her jumpsuit - inserting her fingers into the liquid.
After some convincing, the simplistic organism was coerced to go dormant: slipping beneath her membrane and then hardening again inside of her as a thick, dark ball. She left it below her stomach, where it would obstruct the least amount of flow, and slipped the rags over her—testing her reflection in a pool of murky filth.
Good. She looked like a vagrant.
After several more minutes of this, she’d picked up a number of things. Her clothes were now a ripped patchwork poncho made from the old woman’s garb and a pair of overlarge shorts from an abruptly-deceased drunkard. She wore a manacle and chains around her wrists from a metal recycling bin, and there was another attached to her neck like a metallic leash. From studying the humans, she’d picked up tics: learning to limp, to sag to one side as if her shoulder was tired, to drag her feet, to slouch, and to occasionally make wet, ragged imitations of coughing. Eventually, she felt satisfied—and she soon came limping out of the alleyway a changed woman to find Galve.
She hoped he wouldn’t ask where most of it would come from, much less where she’d found a liquefied human skin sample and human hair sample to jam into her body and hair-blobs respectively. The grime had covered up her cheek spots, but there was no helping her overlarge eye and strange, snouty facial proportions.
Then again, this was an extremely complex and unusual task for her. Most of it was intuitive, but the synthesis of all those individual simplicities was…
She breathed a rich breath of disgusting air as she limped forth from the alley.
…Indescribable. She had no idea how to think of it.
Galve's endeavour was far more direct than that of the Sodalyte. He stepped forth from the alley, avoiding being a center of attention to the greatest of his ability, and crossed streets and sidewalks till he arrived at his destination.
The building was a dresser and a tailor, white and purples inlaid with some dumb logo the ex-Dominion Private paid no attention to. He walked in through the automatic doorway, and was met by a man with a copper skintone, scraggly beard and thick grey handlebar moustache complimenting hair going down to the top of his neck. He wore a white-purple tailcoat suit with a baggy skirt-esque pair of pants that flowed down to his ankles before cutting off- bellbottoms. He nodded to Galve, and began to talk to him in a mixture of Highspeech and galactic basic.
"Greetings, I am known as Vergetti. What brings you here, Kathla?"
Galve responded in pure highspeech, hoping to seem more noble-esque: "Greetings. My calling is Jaren. I... Intended on visiting some Kathlai of mine this afternoon, but all of my nice outfits need cleaning, and my slave has been lacking lately. I was hoping to get something befitting."
"Well, then," he responded in tandem, switching to full highspeech. "You have come to the right place."
The greyhaired man led Galve to the back, and for quite some time they discussed things, measured galve's body, and tailored outfits. He explained away the extra two outfits he garnered as gifts for a similarly-sized friend of his, and their young daughter.
Not long later, he paid in millicents, and left the tailor. Out on the street, he locked eyes with Kana, and began to head over, putting on a facade of anger. He wore the outfit quite well, a flowing purple-white buttoned robe gave way at his midthighs to poofy, long trowsers a dark greyish black in colour. Past the edge of the pants and the sleeves of the robe, he wore white knee-high boots, and similarly-coloured silken gloves. On his right shoulder, a large false-metal pauldron matching the coat with an off-white, purple, and gold colouring to it sat on his shoulder. His head adorned a metal morion-styled helm with a silk purple interior, looking not dissimilar to a fancified conquistador helm. On his face, a digital overlay hovered in front of his eye, glowing softly purple onto his dark skin.
"You!" he called out, trying hard to put a false anger into his voice, "I've been hunting for you, get over here!"
Jaren grasped the chain that hung from Kana's neck, and with a look of silent apology on his face for a moment, continued the fake-angered yelling, "I'll have you sold off to the brothels if you dissapear again, slave," and tugged the chain, leading them farther into the city.
After a moment, he leaned in while none were looking, and whispered.
"I'm sorry for all this, Little Fish. You can get rid of all this once we've made it out."
Kana took a moment to stare at Galve and absorb his new look. She didn’t seem to recognize him—but the lights in her eye dawned when she heard his voice. It only lasted a moment, and she soon fell back into her wretched, twisted posture—simulating a choked grunt when the chain was pulled.
She glared at him with shockingly genuine emotion, quivered, and snarled—her eerily accurate skin-colored liquid forming a convenient backdrop to the dramatic contortion. ”Yes, Master.” She quietly replied, brimming and chilled with emotion as she was led off.
Once Jaren felt it safe to speak to her, Kozakana returned the favor. Though she did nothing to change her pained limp, the awkward lean of her falsely achy shoulders, or the dejectedly slow pace of her walk, she did speak perfectly normally. It was if someone were laying unfitting voicelines over an otherwise perfect character animation—for indeed, the juxtaposition felt totally jarring.
“There’s no need to apologize, Achy Bullet,” she responded, keeping a professional and conversational tone to blend in with the local soundscape. “This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this. If it helps, remember that I don’t feel pain - even if I will-“
She grunted and choked, stumbling at a particularly rough pull of the chain. “-React as if I do.”
He nodded, and lifted himself up, staring straight ahead along the pathway as they took a turn. In an attempt to keep up the act, he grunted and tugged hard at the chain, and called out: "Walk Faster!"
They walked and walked and stepped and stepped along winding slumstreets, slowly the scenery changing to more clean and enunciated buildings, mixes of whites and purples and yellows and tans. People clammored along, some dressed in dirty tatters being dragged along by well-dressed masters, while others in normal clothes simply commuted about their day.
After some time walking, a smell hit their noses, salty and sweet and buttery and enticing; some sort of food vendor. Galve tugged Kana along the intended path, and brought them along the street. At the side of it, a small stand on some sort of hovering device handed out strange things- of which Galve recognized as food- to passerbys who stopped to pay. The Ex-Private brought them into line, and waited, eventually reaching the front. He paid in millicents, and spoke to the vendor.
"Gathi-Cal For Myself, and Nutritional Slop for that one," he hissed, nodding his head back to the short, disguised sodalyte in tow behind him. The Vendor simply nodded him, and handed the items to Galve, who promptly pulled them to the side and sat at a bench, motioning for Kana to take seat on the ground beneath with a harsh nod downwards with his head.
In his hands, he held a cheap bowl filled with some sort of meat, sauce, and potato-like foods, thick and rich and plopped atop a heaping pile of steamed grains; of some he had slipped into the bowl he handed Kana while none were looking.
What was given to the shackled sodalyte was a bowl of pasty pinkish-grey slop with no discernible chunks other than what looked like boiled meat and flavourless, wilted vegetables; of course, with some of the rich Gathi-Cal Galve had given. The Slop was rich in Calories, Vitamins, Protien, and other necessary and cheap things to keep a slave or a poor peasant running through the day, but it was nigh-flavourless.
"Eat up, we still have things to do."
Without wasting much time, Galve took a few bites of the Gathi-Cal, forcing himself to be slow as not to give away his false identity as a rich noble. There was a smile on his face from the food he remembered from years past, and he let out a deep breath as he stretched out in the chair, still keeping his posture straight.
Kana slumped down onto the ground next to Galve like a dejected ragdoll, hunching onto her raised knees and staring morosely at the ground. Her hollow eye only grazed his silhouette when at last he talked to her again, only to shove the disgusting soup into her face. The Sodalyte meekly accepted his offering, clutching it with trembling hands, and twitched her snouty face as she sniffed it.
She wasn't entirely sure how to react. Would a human dislike this? But then, how would they dislike it? Would it be a retch? A curl of the nose into an ugly wrinkle? Maybe even a broken, hollow smile? Torn between too many options and unable to prioritize any given one of them, she instead decided to simply hide her expression in the bowl—planting her face into it like a desperate pig. For the most part, the hunched posture helped to hide her body as it reacted to the slop: subtly shifting tones from the color of the melted skin she'd consumed to the vile concoction of her meal. Once she was finished, she popped a bubble of liquefied skin between her teeth; returning to the right color and unsticking her face from the rim with a sickly pop of grease and fluid.
Kozakana wiped her face onto her rags—partly for the added look, partly to make her seem more outwardly wretched, and partly to clear her sinusoidal skin—and then grimly cradled it upon her knees and in her hands.
"Can I keep it, master?" She croaked, miming the hollow pleas of another slave she'd heard further up the road. "Please, just this once?"
Behind the act, Kozakana had been thinking.
The wealth divide in this city was extremely noticeable. Kana had been paying careful attention to the differences in postures, composures, colors, smells, and styles between the lower and upper classes—and she'd noticed that it was almost night and day. She would have called such a thing an outright caricature of society on any of her preferred channels or feeds, and yet, it was here. It was here, it was real, and while it manifested differently, the concepts and foils were eerily familiar to her.
She idly wondered if the people of this planet would notice a single thing different with their social structure, had they been ruled by the Umi and not the Imperium. Would they even begin to settle into their old routines in time?
No.
No, that was just her trying to justify what she'd done back on Yyro: but why did it need justifying at all? Why was she thinking about it? There was no good data to extract from the idea—so why did she feel it continually gnawing at her like some kind of weed or root?
Something inside her felt wrong, but she still didn't understand what.
Galve peered around him, deducing no-one was looking, and quickly shoveled down the velvety meal in his hands, before wiping face clean with a napkin. He stood as Kana began to let out the false whines and pleads of an act, very convincingly so. Galve let out a sight of exhasperation, waving off the 'slave' beneath him and pulling with the chain.
"Fine." he hissed, believable malice dripping from his voice. "Keep it, but stop groveling, you're making me look bad."
It felt so odd to the ex-private. Having control, power, being at the top of society- even if it was an act he was putting on to avoid being killed or harmed. Having grown up at the bottom, dejected and cast away by those above him.
To be honest, it was awful. How could those Star-Forsaken nobles at the top of the ladder- chain?- pyramid?- feel good about themselves exploiting people. It was something that he may never understand. Something he would never want to understand. Just the act of pretending brought sickness and pain to his gut, and his senses screamed at him to just stop, to let go of the chain-
His train of through was chugging along as he walked them through a shadier part of town, oblivious to what was about to happen...
From the corners of Kana's one-eyed vision, some figures began to approach. First one, then two, then a third trailing them. One had their eyes on Galve's noble attire, and the other two on an odd-looking "slave" that would probably fetch them a lot of money were they to sell them on the auctions...
There was the schink of a blade as one of them took a long dagger from their belt, a and an ever-soft sizzle as the plasma sheath formed around it. The three let out soft chuckles, grinned, and began to get ever-closer- Galve still utterly oblivious.
Kozakana wretchedly gripped her now-empty and still slightly slimy bowl, limply shuffling behind her surrogate master. Still in the guise of a human, the Sodalyte glanced to the three now trailing behind them in the darkness, and she tried to think of how a human would react. She frantically looked to Galve as if to ask him something, stared balefully at her chain, and then suddenly stopped walking. The gooey little woman stood there, faux-gagging on her leash as she was pulled a few extra steps, and waited for Jaren to turn around and see her.
Hatred burned in her eyes, and hatred shook in her fists. Injustice pulled her posture upright like a broken puppet trying to stand, and although her entire body shivered with the simulated wrackings of near-starvation, she held her ground furiously.
"You," she whispered, raising the bowl with quivering fists. "If I just 'Turn My Life Around,' I'll finally be free of you." Kana chuckled, trying to make the implied message less obvious. That turned into a rough simulacrum of hysterical laughter: derived from manic, schizophrenic shrieking and ranting. Kozakana raised the bowl, an insane grin splitting her face nearly in half—
—And then she went totally deadpan to Galve, just before she shattered the bowl over the skull of the man with the knife. Kana screamed, pretending she'd been startled enough by him to change targets, and went scampering to Jaren's side with a shard of plastelain in her trembling grip.
"Two more," she muttered, slipping the dead pilot's pistol into his pocket from where she crouched. "Order me around realistically: we can't give up the act yet."
It all happened in an instant.
The man with the blade was screaming in agony, his two buddies shouting and beginning to run over towards them. Galve had turned around and started to shout at Kana with the fake worries of a slave-master who doesnt exist, before he scowled, took the pistol in his hand, and began to shout at her, keeping grip tight on the chain.
"You! Slave! Dont let those disgusting Morati touch me!"
While the man with the blade wasnt exactly dead, he was whimpering on the ground in pain, one of his comrades having grabbed the knife.
When she started to charge towards the seemingly-nobleman galve, he clenched the trigger, firing off a shot that- due to shaky hands and having hipfired- went wide and instead slammed into the seemingly unarmed thug behind the one brandishing the blade. He dropped with a scream and held at his leg, while galve shoved the pistol into his waistband and frantically pulling out his own blade.
The woman slammed into him, knocking the chain out of his hands and the breath out of his lungs, but he narrowly avoided being stabbed.
"Why you little...!" called out the injured thug that had previously held the Blade. With a grunt he began to stand up, grasping at a shard of razor-sharp glass from the street, and charged at Kana, hopping over the body of his injured comrade in sheer anger.
”Yes, Master,” Kana whimpered, reluctantly scuttling out from behind Galve to take up a meek defense. She scanned over the situation with her one eye, struggling for a moment where a combat model would have reacted on algorithmic instinct, and almost suffered a nasty slash to what would usually be a human’s jugular.
The Sodalyte bent her neck backwards at the base in an inhuman motion, locked her eye to the glass-bearing thug’s with a flash of evil intent, and then whipped around in a whorl of motion. A spray of liquefied human flesh slammed into the man’s face, and while he was stunned, the Sodalyte slipped the glass out from his fingers. She promptly merged it with her fist, sucked in a breath of air, and then swapped to a proboscis-fencing algorithm.
The crack of pressure from her motion hit only barely before the shard of glass was punched straight into his throat, ripping it open in a yawning spray just below the Adam’s Apple. Kana pulled the glass shard out with a flick, snapped her aim to the woman trying to savage Galve, and had to think again.
”Master?” She asked, taking on a traumatic shiver. ”D-Do you need help—?!”
Blood sprayed across the whole street, the glasswielding thug hit so hard and fast he had no time to even scream, his ruined throat simply letting out a choking burble.
Meanwhile, with galve, there were grunts of exertion, a yelp as the plasma singed one of his arms through the gap between his sleeve and glove. A few moments later, the Woman went still, let out a choked gasp, and a quiet Nghh.., while a wet slice and squishing motion sounded out. Galve drove the blade deeper into her gut, then ripped it up and out, unintentionally ripping her midsection open with a wide gash. He pushed the corpse off him, tossed his blade to the side, and stole the plasma blade- not long after it hit the floor and the sheath dissipated.
"You worthless bitch!" he yelled, venom in his voice- he had been getting better at the act- "Why would you ask something like that!? Of fucking course I need help, that is your sole purpose in life!"
He growled, bared his teeth, and gripped the chain once more. With a moment of hesitation, he reared his arm back above his head. As it came soaring down, Galve slapped Kana, the back of his hand striking the center of her face with all of his might- he knew it wouldnt do much to hurt her- and he let out a grunt of exertion. Galve tugged the chain, pulling them farther into the city as his boots clunked against the ground; the chain crinkling and jingling as they moved.
"Fucking pieces of shit..." he hissed, wiping glops of blood off of his still white suit, "I just fucking got this thing..."
Thankfully though, it seems it had been designed with violence (or bad weather) in mind- the outermost layers were hydrophobic, letting a majority of the blood slip away onto the floor.
Kana stumbled into the yank of his chain, her eye going wide and the glass clattering to the ground from her hand. Her entire head rippled with the impact—and with a delay just thin enough to be a reaction and not a boot period, the little Sodalyte yelped and cried out in pain.
She stumbled onto her face at the yank of his chain, barely able to scramble to her feet in time to keep up. The little one-eyed woman in her filthy little wrags was now shivering uncontrollably: both from the fight and the punishment afterwards. She gripped her chain with a haunted sadness, clinging to her prison as the only thing she still truly owned in this world.
Kana, meanwhile, was rather pleased. The whole operation had gone neatly, and they were well on their way to somewhere more respectable. Hopefully the pair hadn’t drawn too much attention.
The random bout of violence had surely attracted a large crowd in the small, dirty region of town. While fighting, theft, and other such scummy acts were common in the slums, this did not stop it from becoming an almost-daily spectacle in their lives. By the time Galve had hurriedly pulled Kana away from the scene- heading towards their intended destination- some of the onlookers had began to frantically loot what they could from the now-dead thugs that had tried to kill the pair.
Galve leaned down, breaking the facade of a noble slaveowner to speak to Kana about their next plan of action. “If we keep heading through this slum, we should be closer to the starport in the richer part of the city. Closer in we get, though, more likely we are to spot actual nobles who could see through my disguise, or Imperial Legions that might do the same. Once we start getting into that part, we’ll need to be even more careful,” he whispered, waiting a moment for the Sodalyte to respond before standing back up, straightening his shoulders once more.
Thankfully, no one had bothered to follow them after the scene in the street, the pair being left alone for the most part- poor slumdwellers mostly not wanting to mess with someone whom they believed to be a noble- it’d be treason, and death, in their eyes.
Within ten or so minutes of walking, stopping for bouts of begging or rage to keep up the facade, and occasional stops in more hidden alleyways to discuss things, the pair had arrived in the part of the city where the spaceport sat, and exited the shady slums. Shuttles pushed off of the ground with distant rumbles as purple lights shot off into the sky, likely cargo being brought to and fro- or nobles going on leisure cruises of some sort.
Before they could get excited, though, something began to cross their paths. With a gasp and a tug at the chain, galve pulled himself and kana into an alleyway, and around a thick stony corner, just as the thumping of metal boots kicking against the dirt road began to sound out. Peering around the corner, they saw a four-wide line of marching soldiers clad in shiny white-and-purple armour, with purple mohawk-like apparatuses sticking out of their sealed steel helms. The leading soldier- likely a commander- shouted out commands in Galve’s native language; Imperial High Speech.
“Stay down, and stay quiet,” he spoke in a quiet voice, lined with fear as his face darkened. “If they catch us, we’re dead. I shouldve just kept us going, but I panicked and now we’re hiding. Shit.”
”Why would they be suspicious of us if we avoid them?” Kozakana murmured back, balefully scanning them with her one eye. ”That’s strange. They should pay us equal attention compared to the rest of the street; shouldn’t they…?”
Something within Kana was practically bouncing for joy as she laid nearly-motionless against Galve’s side. It was a new language. Or, maybe a dialect. Or maybe an ancestor language of some kind. Whatever it was, it was something to decode—and her lips were already silently forming the words as she heard them. As she did-so, she thought to herself: formulating a few different plans in case things went sour.
If the guardsmen stayed, she considered, then they would have to find a means of escaping rationally. Kana could spread herself under the back of Galve’s coat and hide herself, even if it would be a little odd—or she could simply walk out with him as if the two had just been passing through. That could get them to the star port, and maybe she could finally get a disguise like his so she’d draw less ire. Or, perhaps she could dress up like the local flavor of automaton or servant? Difficult. There was also the matter of still drawing their ire, and her disguise wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny.
If they left, it was no problem. The two could continue on their merry way—why had she considered that before the—nevermind. She re-shuffled her list of priorities, confirmed it, and moved on.
Worst-case scenario (should have began with that:) they either saw them dive away, saw them peeking, or simply come looking. They could kill them with some effort, but then what? Did they have dead man’s switches or communicators with silent alarms? What would they need bluffing against? Galve—his behavior would be seen as unnatural to them. Why would a nobleman dive behind an alleyway with his slave? Kana scanned across the day’s memories, scowling… …and then came to a logical conclusion.
She tapped Jaren’s shoulder, whispering again.
”Pretend I’m urinating,” she casually suggested, pulling into a convincing squat and just kind of sitting there. ”People take their slaves around corners to urinate like animals, right? Why else is there so much human waste in these alleys?”
Galve gritted his teeth, pondering their options. He didn't have much of a better idea, to be honest, but he disliked it greatly.
"That... I don't have any better ideas. We'll pull around the corner, walk away, and if any of them question me, that's the story." he said, nodding in agreement.
He took a deep breath, grasped the chain tightly, and put on a sour face, washing away his fear. After a few moments of standing there, Galve pulled the chain and began to walk around the corner nonchalantly, a slowness and deliberateness to his steps, although a bit of hesitation. He peeled to the side and began walking back towards the starport, in the opposite direction the legionnaires were marching.
They got a while of walking, before they were stopped.
A legionnaire, clad in his heavy armour, approached galve. There was no aggression in it, but he still moved towards him; it seemed to be some sort of officer whom wasnt marching in the formation; someone important.
"You," he said in High Speech. "Why did you go into the alley when we approached the street?" the soldier asked galve. The question felt more like it was done out of boredom than suspicion- maybe this march was such a routine that even the commanders despised it.
Galve took a breath, and smiled lightly, a sour smile that you would see in a noble being second-guessed.
"The Morati by me needed to relieve itself," replied galve, speaking in the same language the Legionnaire spoke, an odd regality to his voice brought on simply by the language he was speaking. His accent was noticably more soft compared to the hard gruffness of the soldier. "Isnt that correct?" he asked kana, his face turning into disgust as he tugged at the chain and looked down at her, before peering back up to the Legionnaire.
Kana, of course, parroted the strangled noise of a slave being yanked around on their leash. She stumbled slightly, jerking her fingers and arms in visible pain, and looked up to the legionnaire with her one, big eye. She wondered if the dark hair she'd stolen would be enough to mask her bizarre anatomy - but of course, that was down to the guard's own vision and what exactly these Morati tended to look like. So far, Kozakana had only seen human and humanoid varieties of a near-human type: so she could only guess.
"Y-Yes," she whimpered, remembering and enacting a hollow and terrible stare that she'd seen one of the female Morati giving to a guardsman. "I-I just needed to... I-I... Y-Y... Yes..."
The Sodalyte bowed, thinking again. How quickly could she choke him to death? Where were the joints in his armor? How difficult would it be to simply bash him unconscious with a one-inch punch of pressure and ferocity? Could she without the use of a sharp implement, or would the contact of even her fist disperse the force too much? She ran through the possibilities in her head, silently praying that the melted skin and hair she'd ingested would be enough to fool the guardsman. She almost prepared to suck in a breath of air-pressure, and then paused with a sudden shock of realization.
Bubbles, she thought. If he sees me developing bubbles, he'll know for sure. I can't even pressurize myself if I don't want to blow our cover.
She considered a human expletive for the situation, cycled through a few languages she'd heard on Yyro, and then settled for a suitably vile summation of the situation:
Shit.
The soldier nodded once, and finished walking towards them, now barely a foot away from Kana, and half a head taller than even galve.
"Very well then," he said, seeming to buy the excuse for now. Despite this, he did not leave, and instead roughly grabbed Kana's face at the chin, pushing her to look up at him. "Quite the odd one you have, not seen a thing like it." he noted the odd, non-human biology of the sodalyte. Though, he sounded more astonished than suspicious- maybe having non-human slaves was a sign of vanity here?
Galve scowled, and- very lightly- grasped the soldier's hand, and pulled it off of Kana, before pushing the sodalyte back a bit. It was almost instinctual, and now he had to come up with an excuse.
"Hey-" the soldier was cut off.
"Careful not to touch a noble's things," Galve spoke over-top of him, holding his chin up and straightening his shoulders, "You may protect the star and the Realm, but respect is still due for I and my property." he said coldly.
"Apologies, Sir. I'll bother you no longer." the soldier politely responded, then walked away with a sigh. There goes his one entertainment for the march, Galve thought, then kept walking, still seemingly annoyed at the audacity of the soldier. Galve then turned to Kana and whispered.
"Im annoyed he grabbed you, but apparently they dont seem to care if you're human or not. Shouldve known, but I never bothered much attention to the nobles when I still lived here. Keep the disguise, though- you being bright red would just attract more unwanted attention." he said, continuing down the street. A few blocks down, the flowing, monolithic off-white form of the spaceport- dotted with glowing purple lights- stood, the entrance visible, and various vendors selling the deeds and rights to ships or tickets offworld were in fancy booths of the same colour, the rooves of the booths seemingly flowing out of the form of the spaceport like a wave of off-white and purple.
Almost out of here.
Kozakana corrected her assessment of the situation with a sigh of pressure. Not shit. If anything, this was excellent - but then Galve said the words she'd been dreading.
'...Should've known...'
The Sodalyte scowled, whispering to him in a low, burbling tone as they walked down the valley of the city street toward the mountain reigning over it. "You didn't know?" She hissed, her voice still totally incongruent with her expression and demeanor. "Achy Bullet, you are my only ally and confidante in this world, and I want to... to..."
She paused, thinking of a word as they came toward the ticket booths, and shot him a filthy look. "Strangle. That's what it is. I want to strangle you. The next time we end up in a situation like this, I'm making you the filthy, unkempt slave." Kozakana trembled under the shadow of the multicolored roofs as they passed beneath them, trying to demonstrate reluctance to go into such a high-class area. With a yank of the chain and a strangled gasp, however, she was back on her way; and she settled into line by crawling onto the ground and slouching into a cross-legged slump that left her looking even tinier than usual. Galve, however, might have recognized it as something more significant:
Was she pouting at him? Really? Right now, of all times?
There was a sharp inhale of breath as Galve faltered for a moment, his mask dropping for a moment. He pursed his lips, breathed out slowly, and began moving forwards again, bringing up the lie again as his face turned to passive annoyance once more- a twinge more genuine.
"You really think that-" he stopped himself, and shook his head. "No. We can talk about this later."
Without another word, they entered the spaceport's marketplace. It was bustling and vibrant compared to the dreary dullness of the previous slums and cityscape, neon signs hanging from the entrances to small tents or the openings of booths, bright even through the fading daylight as evening began to set in- the planet's sun softly fading down beneath tall skyscrapers in the horizon. It was a loud place, and such a busy place that less effort needed to go into their disguises; the pair was able to get some semblance of relaxation now as they walked around.
One vendor caught Galve's eye in particular. He seemed to have a very small crowd at his booth, just a couple nobles- some with, some without slaves. He nodded to no one specific, then began to move forwards towards the vendor. While Kana idled about, keeping the disguise up, Galve discussed terms with the vendor and eventually was able to get a good price for a ship- a decent chunk of his SIGEC reserves, but a good ship nonetheless. Nearly twenty minutes after the fact, he nodded goodbye to the vendor, and guided them into the crowded spaceport, not saying anything to Kana quite yet.
Another thirty minutes, they breached through the crowd and into a small launchpad area, a digital key on Galve's holopad unlocking it. The lights flickered on, and a ship came into view. It was quite large compared to their previous ride, standing tall enough to have two floors, and looked to be about thirty meters, at least. It was a sleek thing, coming to a point at the front and widening out to a thin pair of V-shaped wings, and a V-tail, with a large fin on the back that was most likely the ship's hyperspace fin, something found on most Imperial vessels. And most notably, on it's chin was a turret- flush with the front, a wide barrel jutting out with holes in the side similar to what you might see on a coilgun of sorts, but it was a bit off.
"Well, here she is," Galve said, closing the door behind them. He dropped the chain, and smiled.
"So what will we name her?"
Feeling safe in the confines of the launchpad, Kozakana dropped the facade of her posture. The little Sodalyte stepped around the ship, silently marveling at it with her one eye. Her cheek-spots almost shone crimson through the grime she'd caked onto them, unable to hide such an extreme color shift. She marveled at the vessels' sleek lines, and its flush panels - she ogled the turret and landing gear with utter fascination. When she finally felt satisfied, Kana came back around to Galve; a subtle, warm grin brushed upon her cute little face.
"She's incredible," she breathed, turning back to the ship with her big eyes sparkling. "I... I don't know. I've never been asked to name anything before, especially not something as important as... I... um..."
The Sodalyte just stared at it, making a few alien warbles and burbles in place of full words. She tried to articulate what she wanted, failed, and then tried again, her arms folded before her chest and one hand rolling and gesturing. At last, she came to a decision and turned to Jaren with a curious look.
"There's a metaphor," she explained, furrowing her eyebrows. "I heard a soldier on Yyro use it. It was... It was... It was something about fabric. Fabric, covers... night..." She rubbed her round chin, thinking, and then recalled it with a jubliant warble.
"Night!" She exclaimed. "The Cover of Night." For a name?"
He mused over the name for a moment, letting it sink in, whispering it to himself a few times. He nodded, before responding.
"That.... Yeah. That sounds pretty good," he said as he stepped forwards. He turned towards kana, and grabbed at that awful chain necklace, undoing it and moving it to the side. Out from under his arm he carried the set of clothes he'd been wearing, and passed them off to kana, letting her have the small bundle. "Change out of those rags whenever you get the chance," he explained, then held out his hand. "You still got a hold of the AI's core?" he asked.
He thought for a moment as he waited, and then smiled, looking over the Sodalytes face, before his eyes lit up as he remembered what he had wanted to say.
"Also, you can drop the disguise, now," he commented, "you look better in that red colour of yours anyways."
Kana warbled a sigh of relief, sucking up a red bubble from within her liquid body and popping it between her teeth. The particles raced across her interior in a froth, her systems rapidly shifting and flexing to resemble the new input. By the time she was finished, she had returned to that gleaming, Neon red of hers - though she frowned at a small discrepancy.
The Sodalyte poked her gooey ‘hair,’ blinked, and then stuck her hand through the membrane of her head. The temporary divider broke, and the fizz raced up the rest of the way - completing her look with a flourish and a hiss. She studied the clothes Galve had given her, eying the dark pants, the white boots, the silken gloves, the robe, and the headgear and pauldron in turn.
She promptly tossed the helmet and pauldron aside, laid out the boots, gloves, and pants, and put her hands atop the trousers. Kana spread a thin layer of acid across a few points of the cloth, melting openings here and stretching and pulling it there. By the time she was done, it was something closer to a set of strapless, sleeveless overalls - and she nodded in satisfaction. The Sodalyte reached down to begin undressing, blinked, and then paused.
“...Is it… appropriate to do this in front of a human?” She looked up to Galve, her mouth cocked to one side. “I’ve seen some undressing in front of others, but I’ve also seen some hiding while they do it. The custom is… still foreign to me.”
Galve watched curiously as the sodalyte began to deconstruct and modify the garments he had procured for her, the acid burning the trousers into an odd shape, before she began to reach down-
There was a sharp intake of breath, and galve bit his lip once more, ready to turn around as his face darkened slightly. "...I-It depends," he stuttered out, before shaking his head. "Now, probably not. ..I can explain it later, alright? Just, i'll head onto the ship and you do that. Oh, and-" he turned about and began walking to the ship with an awkwardly hurried pace, "-dont forget to have the AI out and ready when you get in here so we can jack him in!"
The door to the ship hissed open as he stepped in, wanting to peek over his shoulder but instead steeling forwards, the door remaining open behind him. The inside of the ship took on a soft, shiny silver colour with lining of the everpresent imperial purple, empty "photograph" screens flat black and sticking out from the rest of the wall, with fake screen-windows to the outside powered off with the rest of the ship. Galve thumbed a button near the entrance as he stepped in, drawing power from the batteries to turn on the lights of the ship and all other basic systems like screens and reactor controls.
He peered to his right and saw the door to the cockpit, and began to stride towards it.
Kana shrugged as Galve turned away, already peeling away the rags draped over her glassy membrane's surface.
. . .
Kana came into the cabin just as Jaren was exiting it. The Sodalyte opened her mouth, about to tell him she'd finished, but surprised herself by pausing and absorbing the architecture of the place. Really, she reflected, that's what human ships like these are. Buildings and homes in the air. She traced her fingers along one of the machine's beveled corners, scanning over its composition and angles with her single eye.
Flashes of memories bubbled up from the fractured pieces of her hole-punched past, but she dismissed them as she walked toward the cockpit door. It was like the brutalism of her homeland, but at the same time, there was a curious opposition. It wasn't a place designed to feel cramped, or oppressive, or restrictive. It wasn't a directionless, algorithmic mesh: calculated for some arbitrary set of rules and regulations that twisted it into some Escherian labyrinth. It was a space designed with a center. It was designed with people; with organisms in mind.
She was at once blanketed in its mirror finish and totally alienated by the minds which had designed it.
Kana pushed through the door to the cockpit, trying to rid herself of the odd feeling swirling in her mix. She caught sight of Galve working out the layout and controls and called to him, spreading her arms in a presentational way.
"...How do I look?"
Kana had dulled the colors of the fabric as she'd melted and altered it. Laid against her neon-red skin, the trousers had been morphed into a set of ash overalls that rode up just under the Sodalyte's arms. She wore the white boots and gloves as they were, covering her limbs like flared extra-sleeves: and she'd turned a scrap of the purple robe into a lavender scarf.
"I extrapolated some of the fashion I saw in the advertisements," she explained, sliding her gaze around the cabin in a smooth line that betrayed her artificial nature. "...I... hope it's satisfactory."
By the time Kana had made her way to the Cockpit of the ships, the reactor had already been warmed up sufficiently, and all the lights and systems had been booted up properly. He was fiddling with some controls when he heard the door hiss open, and turned around expectantly. His eyes went wide for a moment, looking over kana's new outfit, before he coughted and smiled.
"U-uhm, yeah," he responded, not sure what to say. "You look great, Kana. I like yo- It, the outfit."
He nodded to the copilot seat to his right, and turned around once more with a sigh, shaking his head slightly. Between them, a port whirred open that seems like it would fit with the AI that Kana still held in herself. Galve didnt say anything about it, and presumably expected her to remember what to do.
"So, Kana? Ready to get out of this... Cesspit? Now that we have our own ship, we can go anywhere we want!" Galve waved his arms out widely. "Only problem is, we're gonna need to find some sort of job, a way to pull in income. Fuel isnt free, afterall."
He frowned, and turned towards the sodalyte. Looking into her eyes a while, the frown dissolved, and he waved his worries away.
"Im sure we can find something. Afterall, nothing's stopped us yet, right?"
Kozakana's cheek-spots flushed a vibrant pink at Galve's compliment. She nodded at his gesture, came to sat down, and opened her hand: revealing the solid-state cylinder in which Revo was engraved. The Sodalyte examined its translucent surface curiously, peering into the prismatic labyrinth of data-faces held within, and turned to Jaren with a smile.
"There's always work somewhere," she observed, sliding the data-cylinder into its pencil-sized receptacle. "You have a strong body, you can fly a ship: I'm flexible, I can freely produce chemicals. I'm not sure about how useful we might be intellectually, wherever we go, but I do know this..."
She put a gloved hand on his lap, her eyes still basking in his.
"We make a good pair, Achy Bullet. That, and..." She looked away a little sheepishly, burbling to herself in something that sounded like the vague imitation of a laugh. "And, if everything else fails, we're both very good at killing people."
He smiled brightly at the sodalyte, nodding in thanks as she inserted Revo into his slot. Nothing happened, yet, maybe the AI was waiting to make his appearance once more.
"Yeah, youre right..." he said. "We can find something to do. If we can, though, I would rather avoid killing..." he said somberly. "But, beggars cant be choosers, i guess."
He placed his own gloved hand atop hers, and let out a sigh. "How about Natar? Dont know much about it, but ive heard it's one of the most prosperous places in the galaxy, and it's probably got good work, one way or another. Should be able to find something there, yeah?"
There was a beeping from the console, and a holo-projector popped up with Revo's form. He was grinning, as ever, and spoke loudly in his signature drawl.
"Natar, eh? Sounds like a good idea to me. Got myself hooked up to the ancnet, and it sure is a place to go for work. Just, 'careful where you step, place is rampant with organized crime. Dont get caught up in anythin' you cant get us out of, aye?"
Galve acknowledged the AI with another nod. He lifted his hand and softly placed it on Kana's cheek. He held it there for a while, before he pulled away. "Should probably sit down and strap in, Little Fish. Gonna pull us out of this place. Once we jump, we'll have time to explore the ship a bit more, talk about things.
He turned in his seat, and began to strap himself in, flicking up a display. There was a slight rumble and the ship began to lift up off the ground while Kana moved to the copilot chair..
"That sounds good to me."
The Sodalyte settled into her seat with a gelatinous wobble, eyed its restraints, and quietly selected the 'dwarf' option with a confused look. Her eyes went wide as the setup on her side shifted; zero-tolerance joints and seams expanding and contracting various pieces of the control center to place them in her reach. She made a warbled, frustrated noise, and tried to settle back into the thing now that it'd jostled her around. After a bit of work, she relaxed: flowing backward into the thing's cushioning as the ship began its acceleration.
"What," she said, after some quiet thought, "is the... Enk-Net? Is it like a local air network?" She frowned, trying to parse the text on screen. "And is there a monochrome option?" She mumbled, furrowing her eyebrows. "I keep reading the letter edges as... As..." The Happosei faltered, staring at the display, and went quiet.
"Sodalyte text," she said, a dark numbness twinging her words.
Why do I want to tell him?
She looked at Galve, her cheek-spots blanched so clear that one could use them to stare through her body like windows. It could ruin things. It could make him hate me: it could do all sorts of damage. So why... What's trying to make me speak?
She opened her mouth into a small hump, constructing her mono-teeth as her lips parted, and found herself shocked at the noises she was making.
"Galve," she said, something foreign and soft blanketing the word. "I—"
"Ancnet's the thing connectin' the whole wide galaxy, miss," the AI responded politely. In front of her, a small holo-display flickered up, and on it images of different famous places or faces in the galaxy appeared. Shortly after, it disappeared. "Just about anything you wanna know? 'net's got it."
Meanwhile, galve let out a groan as the weight of thrust pushed him down. Usually, Antigrav wouldve corrected it, but for some odd reason the imperials had programmed it to only function in space. Safety, maybe. He pressed hard on a few buttons before Revo got the prompt and finally flicked it on forcefully. The weight left his chest, and kana was no longer being pushed into the seat's cushioning.
"Ah, shit, I hate physics." he said shaking his head as the ship pushed farther up into the atmosphere, the hellish city becoming naught but a circle in the distance, blending in with the surrounding mass of slums. He turned his attention to the little-fish, while still paying attention to the flight.
"Yeah, Kana? Something wrong..?" he asked.
"I can take the wheel, kiddo," prompted Revo. Galve nodded, and let go of the controls. The sky darkened ever more around them, and the planet got ever smaller. Galve turned his chair, undid the belts, and leaned forwards to kana, not saying anything yet.
"A-About... About..."
About Yyro? Was she going to do this right now? Kana could feel her thoughts physically slowing down, as if the stress were dragging time to a standstill. She wobbled as the belts zipped away, folding her hands between her plump legs and staring through them into nowhere.
"About... Yyro. D-Did I.... Did... I....."
She frantically tried to parse the situation, her eyebrows furrowing. Why was she doing this? Why did she feel the need: the compulsion to do it? What was Galve to her? Why had she stuck with him? Why hadn't she looted his corpse after they'd escaped Yyro, or ditched him at the first sign of the ship and had the AI take over? It didn't make sense. It wasn't in her program: but then, neither was that kiss.
Electric. Overwhelming. The things that she'd lost: in some way, their broken pieces had been replaced by that kiss. She'd read Galve's DNA: She'd absorbed it into herself. Somewhere in her, some of it had been used as a scaffold. Somewhere, that X-factor was boiling in her liquid. As she was about to unleash it, however, something else took over her mind.
"...Fission material." She realized, blinking slowly. Her tone shifted like the rapid impacts of a gear shift. "Did I... ...I told you I need fission material, right...?" She desperately hoped the segue was smooth enough to fly past, but somehow, she doubted things would be so clean.
He could tell something was wrong by the way the soda held the expression on her face. Something was wrong, and she.. Wasnt telling him. Maybe it was important, maybe it wasnt. He'd find out eventually, but if she felt the need to pull back like that, now probably wasnt the time.
"I wont push, but, at some point, we can talk about whatever it was you were going to tell me."
He then processed what she had said to change the topic. Fissile material.... He vaguely remembered her mentioning it before, sometime on Yyro. "Yeah, I think you did. Once we've jumped, we can search the ship for something. If not, well, human food should be able to keep you functioning until we can buy some, right?" he inquired, nodding. "We should be j-"
The lights of the ship dimmed to red as the alert played on the screen.
"Revo, get us the fuck out of here, now!"
"Calm yerself, I'm doin' m'god damned best! Hold on!"
The ship accelerated more, as its thrusters began to push it to its limits already. In the distance, images of a massive warfleet began dropping into the system, their weapons crashing into Imperial warships. The Dominion. They were here, fighting the Imperium. Almighty hope they can escape from this.
"Hyperdrive's almost Ready!" called out Revo. Galve reached over, and offered his hand to the sodalyte, looking over at her.
Kana nodded, wincing. Of course he'd noticed; there was about an eighty per-cent chance he would.
She then opened her eyes wide, confused at the colors and symbols on-screen. The Sodalyte opened her mouth and closed it again, frantically trying to parse the text as she flipped her own restraints over herself. As she did so, she yelled over the cacophony that had enveloped them.
"Galve!?" She gripped his hand in both of hers, staring into his eyes with one filled with questions, fears, and calculations. "Galve, what's happening!? Is the ship going to survive? What's a Dominion?" For the first time in a long time, she had no knowledge base about the situation. No memories, no programming; nothing. The unknown loomed in front of her, wider and blacker than Space itself: and Jaren could see its ugly tendrils widening her pupil and accelerating the pulse of her 'breath.' Faster, faster: like she was hyperventilating.
"Hey, hey, kana," he tried to reassure her. The fear was palpable on his face, and in the air, sweat beading down his face as he too found himself on the verge of hyperventilating. This wasnt good, this wasnt good at all. But she- she needed him to be calm. He took a deep breath.
"Its okay, Kana, Its gonna be okay. I'll tell you everything later, i just need you to calm down for me, okay?"
He let her squeeze his hand, giving an equal reaction with his own hand. Before he could say anything else, though, the world melted away and the weight of the world was shoved onto their chests; they entered into hyperspace.
. . .
The Fighter had lept from the system like a frog leaping across a pond in fast-forwards, lunging forwards and into Hyperspace. The fighter's thin, black frame was bathed in the soft glow of purples and blues, streaking past a million trillion lights, white and blue, and many other hues; the floes and clouds of hyperspace were beautiful to some, and a pointless insanity to others. Behind the fighter trailed blood-streaks of red plasma from the Kestrel's fusion torches. With closer inspection, one could see the vague figures of two people, one tall and armoured, the other short and bubbly, through the faint glow of the kestrel's internal redlights. Granted, if anyone could be watching to begin with.
Ever since the jump to hyperspace, Happosei Kozakana-2230 and Jaren Galve- no longer a Private (Second Class) -had been mostly silent. The trip to the High Imperium wouldnt be long- an hour at most -and they had been quietly watching the stars pass by for half an hour. Galve's arm was still held tightly around Kana's, as she sat upon his lap. His breathing was slow; methodic and in tune with the pseudomechanical breaths that Kana too took, an odd and calming rythm kept between them for so long. Galve yawned quietly, the first noise other than the quiet sounds of the hyperdrive and the engines in a long while. Breaking the ice- no -the warm barrier between them, Jaren spoke; his voice was soft yet gruff- tired.
"Hey, Kana..." he spoke first, lifting his hand off of the neon-red amoeba's back. "Is everything okay, you awake?"
Reaching, he pulled off the armour of his gloves, laying them to the side, then pulling away the gloves themselves. He flexed his fingers, letting them take in the air for the first time in quite a bit. He mumbled to himself about it being 'much better..' and leaned back in the pilot's chair once again, looking down at 'kana. Her Red frame was bright against the vivid colours of FTL outside of the canopy, and accentuated by the glowing red lights of the cockpit's instruments. A smile was brought to Galve's face, as he offered a few tentative pats upon the sodalyte's shoulder.
"You said you wanted to talk, yeah?" he asked, sighing. "I think I need to, as well..."
The Sodalyte drone stirred, and then jolted awake - a flash of sapience sparkling along her left eye. Her only eye - big, and round, and edged with a sharp, black mono-lash. The socket where the other should have been was smooth, but she'd covered it with a liquid 'bang' of gooey 'hair'. Her cutesy little cheeks alit with color, the insides of their spots filling to a rich pink, and she rose up off Jaren's chest with a squiddy murmur of liquid disgruntlement.
"Talk," she repeated, sucking in a breath of the cabin's atmosphere and filling herself with bubbles of the stuff to get her streams moving. "I... Yes, that's a good idea."
The little biot sat there for a moment, unsure of what to think about Galve's shoulder-pats, and looked down again as her gaze drifted off into space.
She couldn't tell him why she'd been there.
She couldn't tell him that she was the one who started that war. She was the one who planted evidence, who set up false casus belli for the itchy trigger fingers of the Yyroid natives and the Dominion. She didn't build the foundations, but she sped the process along and made it a hundred times worse than it ever should have been - and now here she was, sitting in a ship with one of the very men she'd doomed all those months ago, still trying to understand how it had come to this.
"Why don't you talk first?" She looked up again, tried to meet his eyes, and found that her body wouldn't let her. Instead, she opted to look out the window: obscuring her eye from his view as she turned.
"I... I-I'm still not sure how to talk about things, for myself. ...A-Apologies."
That excuse would wear thin in time, but for now, it worked.
"Me, talk?" he said, raising an eyebrow and his smile fading slightly. "Fair enough, I guess. Where to start though?" he mused, the last part mostly spoken to himself as he pondered, turning to meet eyes with the soda to no avail, as she had already turned her bubbly head. Galve thought for a moment more, his brows furrowing.
"Well, to start... I'm from the place we're headed to. The High Imperium, Zapoth. I was seventeen when the Legionaries came to my door to conscript me. I... Didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to any of my friends, let alone the one family member I had left. No time to take any of my belongings, so I dont have anything left besides a photo i have folded up in one of the pouches on my armour. My mom..."
He paused, wincing as he too stared out the window of hyperspace. So little had been said, yet an ache already lingered at the edges of his being, a longing to cry, as tears threatened to overflow. Despite this, he carried on in defiance and kept them held back, for now.
"She was already dying when they took me. It felt like she died the day they did, and at this point i've accepted it as if it were fact... Wouldn't be surprised. No-one to care for her, and the government wont do shit for her, never wanted to from the start. Fucking noble pricks." he continued, a hint of anger mindling with the sadness, pushing the tears back a while longer.
He continued, still staring off into the colourful void of hyperspace as he curled his lips in disgust. "I was seventeen years old when they took me. I turned thirty a month ago. About two or three years into the conscription, I got shoved onto a fleet leaving the galaxy, the universe we know. Back to one that the Imperium used to call home long before Ancerious. There, the Dominion happened, and i got stuck in conscription again because they were fighting a losing war against some people the noble assholes had a grudge with. Bastards live for forever, so of course they have people they still hate from some ancient homeland we havent seen in forever."
"Then, the Dominion somehow had their capital planet, which just so happened to be the terraformed ancestral home of my people, brought back to this galaxy. Still confuses me how it happens." he said with a smile, almost having forgotten about the sodalyte. Almost. He turned his head back down to look at her, and laid his hand beside where she sat, facing upwards, almost as if offering it to her. His voice broke ever-so-slightly, and a tear ran down his cheek as he finished his thought: "But.... I-I'm glad I did make it back to this forsaken galaxy. It's bearable, with y-you in it.."
He smiled sadly, and spoke to her.
"Thats the best I think I can do for now."
he paused, and frowned.
"I-I... Don't think I can bring myself to talk about the awful things that happened; the awful things I did on that planet. I can't put it into words. Are you sure there's nothing for you to say, Kana?" he asked, waiting for the sodalyte's response.
Kana listened to Galve's story carefully, and she tried to rationalize it in her own mind.
She knew what being forced into this line of work was like. She knew that too well, in fact: but she didn't know what a 'mom' was. The Sodalyte couldn't realistically understand his attachment to such a person, because she didn't understand sex, and didn't understand parenthood, and didn't understand biological caretaking: but she did know how it felt to see people die. So she nodded silently, rubbing her shaken companion on the shoulder as he continued.
She knew exactly what it was like to get dragged into a war so long and esoteric that nobody knew why it was fought anymore. If anything, she found herself surprised that Jaren treated it so bitterly: because for her, things like that had always been a fact of life. She blinked, looking curiously out into the depths of space as he finished, and gave the cockpit a few moments of respectful silence.
"...You're a good mix, Jaren."
She smiled in an unusual way, placing one of her hands atop his. "The Universe has taken a lot from you. After all that suffering, I think you should feel proud that you're still... ...a good person." The Sodalyte fingered the loaded pistol stored within her right thigh, rubbing along the top of it silently. "A good person," she repeated with more conviction, looking up into his eyes again. "And, as cruel as it may be to say..."
Kana looked down, letting her expression soften. "...I'm... happy those things happened to you, in a way. Because of that, I got to meet you. Now, we get to put those things behind us. Both wouldn't be possible without that suffering, but then, they wouldn't be necessary either."
She frowned, her eyebrows creasing and cheek-spots losing saturation. "...So why does that possibility seem so... ...Not sad. Bad word. It's happy in some ways, but sad in others? Like..." She pantomimed something drilled into her chest with a twisting finger. "Like removing a bullet from your membrane. It's bad to have it there, but it feels strange and empty for a while when you still remember it being there."
Kozakana slumped a little, folding her fingers in her lap, and looked down at them sadly.
"Maybe I would've been happier about my life, too, if I weren't.... weren't ordered out there. No, not maybe. I would've been. Even if I died in some pointless attack on my home city or got decommissioned for one too many slip-ups, or just lived long enough to be fully recycled, I think I really would've been happier. I wouldn't have had to.. t-to kill..."
She shuddered. "...To kill so many... so..... s-so many M.. M-Mul... People." She forced the word between her lips, clenching them viciously to catch it in the act of transforming. "To kill. So. Many. People. Like you, or me, or any of the other Happoseis I knew back home."
"But then," and she looked up and gave a trembling smile that threatened to break, "I wouldn't have met you either, achy bullet."
Galve nodded quietly, letting the words of the sodalyte sink in for a while.
"I.. I'm sorry." he softly spoke, offering a sad smile in return, his eyes looking down from the window, and into the eye of the Happosei. "To kill is... Arguably, one of the worst feelings. Taking away the life of someone, let alone... s-someone you knew," his voice shook, the smile he had fading away again as he turned his head away, another drip of salty tears streaming down his face as he threatened to break.
"Kana, I-"
He was cut off as the plane beeped at him, a holographic form appearing in-between the two. The hologram was a burnt-orange colour, in the shape of a short man- only six inches tall- with a large jacket and baggy pants, hands shoved into the pockets of the former. His hair was short, and slicked back, and his face was sharp. On the floating man's head was a seemingly out-of-place cowboy hat, worn loosely and partly sideways.
"Sentimental time is over, Kiddos. We're boutta' leave hyperspace in thirty seconds. Brace ya'selves."
The orange man was facing towards galve, and hovered around in the air to look at the sodalyte, offering a huge smile. "I ain' seen much like you before, Red. Kana, is it?" he questioned, sitting down in the air between them with crossed legs, the hat fizzling away into nothingness.
Galve let out a deep sigh, but wasnt given the chance to speak.
"M'name's Revo, and i'm the artificial intie hooked to this rig. Till you ditch this ride, I'm stuck with you" the AI spoke, leaning back against blank space as if a wall were behind his form. "Unless, of course, you bring me along with you!" he exclaimed, smiling wider and scratching at the back of his head.
"We'll take you with us, but could you not have introduced yourself Beforehand?" galve replied, frowning.
"Nah, had ta' give you kids time to be sad. Woulda been rude to just barge in without good reason, dontcha think?"
Before Galve could reply, hyperspace was drained of all its colour, the fighter lurching sharply as it was pulled into realspace over their destination by the gravitational well of a planet, or maybe an interdiction field. Stars twinkled in the purplish-black of space around them as a planet came into view, brown-and-green with small pockets of muddy blue on the backwater world of Zapoth. Some small-scale traffic went back and forth between stations and the surface, but overall it seemed like a dead system, outside of a small fleet of white-and-purple warships, massive in scale, hovering above the world.
"Save yah words, Jaren. Better get this baby landing."
Kozakana's head did a full 180 on her shoulders at the abrupt noise. She glared at the little space-cowboy with a confusing stare, trying to scan her eyes across the form and seemingly read him until he started moving. At that, she crawled up onto her knees and sort of awkwardly shuffled around until her plump legs were sat the same way as Galve's - her head against his chest and under his chin.
"Happosei Kozakana-2230," she coldly reported, staring at the thing with tremendous suspicion. "And I think discussing your route with the pilots of your ship is an extremely 'good' reason. What..."
She waved a neon-red hand through the image, scowled, and then jammed the thing into her head; its membrane merging through the rest and intersecting in a surreal way. "...What is happening?" She demanded, flicking her gaze around the cockpit. "I'm not receiving any Loud Weapons through my osmotic processes. Jaren, what is this th-"
And then spacetime's ragged smear resolved into an inky night. Kana tensed up, wincing at the sudden jolt, and went wide-eyed.
"Jaren?"
She got up on her knees again and pressed her face to one window, staring intently out into the night. Through the almost-opaque blur of her liquid, he could see her cheek-spots draining to a warm white.
"Whose ships are those?"
After the jump-sequence was finished, Jaren moved his hands around the sodalyte's small body and grabbed onto the controls of the Jet, pushing the engines into a full burn as he shot forth towards the planet. With a strain, he replied to her- "Imperials."
The AI finished Galve's thoughts, and answered the sodalyte's question from before the jump ended.
"Them ships belong to the High Imperium, massive sunnuvabitches, they are. Probably filled with a crew of slaves and led by some Dreftallech asshole at the helm of the cruiser there. So long as you land real quick and abandon the fighter and your armour, we should be good. Oh, and by the way miss, I'm a hologram. Made out of a projection of light. My real body is inside the fighter, just a datacore. Can chip it and bring my personality with y'all, but most of my processing power will be left behind."
Galve nodded as the AI spoke as to confirm what he said, but focused on getting the fighter out of danger. The Imperials tried to hail the speeding craft, but found it had no radio. Their massive guns turned to fire, but by the time they did, the fighter was already streaking through the atmosphere of the planet.
"Revo, why dont you land this thing!? I'm not a trained pilot!" called out galve, waiting to let go of the controls with a wince in his voice.
"Bah, fine. Cant do nuthin' yourself now can ya?" the AI replied, dissipating away as the ship began to move itself, heading for a backwater city on the backwater planet, the whole body of it shaking as if it were going to fall apart. Without waiting, Galve pulled away from the controls and instead elected to pull the sodalyte close to his chest, clearly fearful of the violent atmospheric re-entry; although, probably more worried about Kana being hurt than anything else.
"Hold on kiddos!" yelled Revo, laughing loudly over the fighter's speakers.
And hold on Galve did indeed.
"Slaves?" Kana rolled the word around on her tongue, looking confused. "What is that? Slave. And the Imperium: who are they? I was never really told about them—only the Dominion..."
The Sodalyte quieted herself down at Revo's explanation, but she only seemed more confused. Kozakana leant forward, tapping the light with one finger, and scowled at it. "But that doesn't make sense," she muttered, waving her clear fingers through his 'body'. "How is it constrained to just-?"
She poked at the thing as they descended, alternating between examining the enemy ships—specks as they would be to anything but the enhanced views of the ship's optics—and harassing Revo's projection. She seemed to grow more and more uncomfortable as the ship started shaking, gently pulling herself into a balled fetal position atop Jaren's lap. She hugged herself tightly, burbling in dangerous tones as she saw the world starting to burn around her, and leant into Galve's embrace like he was her only lifeline.
It almost sounded like she was whimpering in bubbles and warbles. While Galve held on, Kana seemed to try and make herself as small as possible - her one eye wide and terrified at the sight of the searing heat around them.
Had she ever actually seen re-entry before, let alone experienced it this viscerally? It was like this was her first time doing anything of the sort, even after spending so much time on Yyro after her presumable landing.
Galve gritted his teeth, tensing up as he held the sodalyte close.
"The High Imperium.. My home. My birth-nation. I'll tell you more late-"
He was cut off as the fighter jolted, slowing down as the nose tipped up sharply to work as a giant airbrake, dropping the craft's speed significantly as they got ever closer to the ground, sprawling dirty cities of curved purply and white buildings interspersed with crowds of commoners crawling around in the wide slums. Galve gulped, and tried to continue talking.
"Kana... Slaves are..." he paused, thinking of what to say as he whispered near the sodalytes ear- not daring to get louder, maybe out of freezing fear or a want for the AI to not hear him..? "...a slave is someone, a living-breathing being with sapient thoughts, who is treated like nothing but property; nothing but a tool. Be it for work, entertainment, sacrifice, or..." he cringed, "...nevermind, you'd not get it. Either way, it's an awful practice."
Galve let out a deep sigh as the Kestrel no longer shook, the AI controlling it down towards the ground as a large patch of dirt called a landing strip came into view, the VTOL engines coming to bare as the wings pointed down, shoving exhaust and jet-trails downwards to the ground as a cloud formed around them. The plane hit the ground with a mighty, bone-shaking thud as the systems began to power down; the cockpit cracking open slightly as galve loosened his grip on Kana.
"Alrighty, we've hit sweet sweet land, lil'uns. Hop out whenever you'd like, and dont forget to grab my core out of the dash before you go."
Revo dissapeared, and from the dashboard of the cockpit, a small cylinder turned and ejected out, revealing a cylindrical red-glowing device that seemed to shoot with energy inside it-
Revo's datacore.
As the aircraft’s turbulence slowed and settled, the Sodalyte released from her fearful grip. Slowly, carefully, she got up; still shivering just a little. A hesitant hand found its way onto Galve’s shoulder, using him for support as she sat up crosswise upon his lap. Strangely, however, she didn’t look relieved.
If anything, she looked… strangely empty.
“A living, sapient person; who is treated like property.”
She stared down at her free hand, the palm open, and clasped the fingers shut around an invisible needle-point. Kana smiled sadly, looking up to Jaren, and spoke with a melancholic quiet.
“It sounds just like home,” she realized; looking down again as the Kestrel’s systems slowed and landed them on the dirty field.
“…Just like how life was, there.”
She plucked the core from the console, turned it over a little to examine the thing, and then palmed it to Galve—disinterested and disheartened. She looked out on the strange sky and fauna of a new world, and yet, that same curiosity she’d had in space had vanished. Now, she had a kind of resolute countenance—as if she were waiting for a familiar hammer to drop.
“You don’t need to explain any more, Achy Bullet. I believe I know what that word means now.”
Galve nodded in understanding, and placed his hand on the Core. Grabbing it from the sodalytes hands, he grabbed his gun from the side of the cockpit, and popped the lid of the craft fully. With a hiss, the atmospheres equalized, and the ladder began to set down from the cockpit with a quiet whirr. Jaren's armour clacked against itself as he heaved himself out of the seat and onto the ladder, before offering a hand to Kana.
After they had hit the ground, the first thing he did was start tugging at the metal that covered him, plate-by-plate. First the shoulderguards hit the ground, then the gauntlets and kneepads. Piece by piece the metal fell to the ground, finally ending as he tugged the heavy metal-and-cloth chestplate over his head and threw it to the ground. In the end, all he was left with was the black jumpsuit below his armour, some garments in the way of gloves and some velcro-pouches for ammo he had ripped off his chestplate, and finally, the metal railing slung over his back that held his rifle.
In his hands was his knife, and the core; the latter of which he held back out to the sodalyte. Finally breaking the silence, he spoke out.
"Kana, you think you can keep this in a bubble? Think it'd be safer than me holding onto it."
Kozakana let off a liquidy pop when the cockpit opened, the bubbles inside her rushing, swirling, and then equalizing in a new pattern. She clambered over to the side of the Kestrel’s cockpit, seating herself on the edge without a shred of concern, and watched curiously as he peeled the armor layers back.
“Human armor is very complicated,” she observed, gently taking the AI’s core and eying it quizzically. She clasped a clawed hand around the thing, winced, and grimaced; pooling a bit of her membrane into a liquidless bubble of air surrounding the thing. She took a moment, panting, and then stuck a finger in; drawing up a stream of bubbles and popping them out of her mouth. As she did so, the surface rapidly shrunk—leaving a vacuum-compressed, waterproof skin over the thing. She eyed it to make sure it was secure, nodded, and popped it in her mouth—shoving it under her collar with a gulp of fluid.
“It’s secure,” she reported, leaning slowly back over the cockpit and looking down. She examined the featureless dirt for a bit, looked back up to Jaren, and snapped something halfway between a human salute and a human wave.
“See you on the ground, ex-private.”
She then promptly tipped over the side, crashing onto the runway. There was an audible warble, crash, and splat as she hit the dirt, but after a brief stint, the vibrations had settled. She sat up, dusted herself off, and stood—tapping the soil with one foot.
“The terrain is safe,” she reported, making that strange pinch-and-pull gesture that he was coming to understand as a ’come here’. “It’s alright to come down.”
Galve shook his head, smiling as he climbed down the ladder, placing a foot on the ground, protected only by leather wraps that had been under his armoured boot, shooing away some rocks from under where he stood.
"Alright, we're planetside. Let's get the fuck out of here before people start swarming..."
Before they could stick around very long, Galve nodded towards the Sodalyte, and began walking. They werent very far from the slums of a grandiose city of whites and purples, presumably the capital of the planet. They stepped through side-streets and alleys for some time, the fighter left behind for passerbys to mess with. Galve eventually held out his hand near the edge of a street, keeping them inside an alleyway.
"Here's a good place to stop, and go through our options" he suggested, letting out a breath and leaning against the metal of a seemingly hastily produced slumhouse, the dirty white looking closer to a light brown and the purple highlights scuffed and discoloured.
"We both need new clothes, first off," pointed out galve, tugging at the nearly-skintight jumpsuit he wore, and flicking his eyes to the more liquid-gel jumpsuit of which Kana wore. "Then we need to eat something, and get some sort of ride off this planet, preferably one we can keep for ourselves."
"So, Kana, what first?" he asked, raising his eyebrows slightly as he waited for her response.
Kana peered eerily through the darkness, having changed back to a muddy mix for the time being. Dressed only in a patchy and slightly ripped black jumpsuit, she blended too dimly into the shadows: a stark darkness against her freakishly bright surroundings.
She flicked her one eye to Galve’s face, scanned across the street for a moment, and then muttered a decision.
”Primary objective is to blend in,” she observed, gesturing out to the local architecture. ”Overall operations will be significantly easier with basic disguises and regalia. I don’t suppose there are fashionable varieties of helmet or mask on this planet…?“
She tapped a foot on the ground, frowning deeply. ”That, or we play the slave angle. I find ragged clothes and manacles, and you dress abnormally well. Either way, a disguise is good. Necessary.”
But why did she need one? She herself didn’t seem to question the automatic assumption, taking it as a fact as she looked carefully over their surroundings.
Galve peered around the corner, looking about the crowds, particularly their clothing. His brow furrowed as he went deep into thought, listening to Kana intently.
"Hm. Helmets arent a commonality, no. Either way,- no offense- but with how alien you are, the latter will work a lot better, and fool people. Only thing we'll have to worry about is maybe some sickos trying to buy you, n' I can tell them to back off. Only issue is how we're supposed to find fancy clothing for me to wear..."
He slipped his hand into a thin pocket on his jumpsuit, pulling out a small, thin bar that when pressed, popped out a red hologram- some sort of Digital wallet.
"I still have the SIGEC from my military paycheck, looks like they havent thought to take it. If we can find what we need to begin with, I can probably buy it."
He eyed the area around once more, looking towards the more crowded areas, nodded towards something. From a fancier looking building, a tall man in flowing white-purple robes with coppertoned skin and long black hair stepped out of a building, clean and pristine, as if the robes were fresh from a tailor.
"Maybe we can get something there," he said, turning back to Kana as an idea popped into his head. "Alright, so. If you can slip back into the slums, steal some discarded rags, and maybe some rope or metal chain, and meet me back here, I'll head in and get the clothes I need. From there, we can walk about without much worry, and get everything else we need."
He thought again for a moment.
"I'll see about getting some clothes for you to get into while im there, you can put them on once we've made it out. Until then..." Galve placed a hand on her shoulder, and gave a gentle shove, then smiled warmly. "Stay safe, and i'll meet you back here when im done."
Without waiting very long, he stepped out of the alley, and headed down the road to the shop he'd seen the noble exit, cautiously looking around him constantly.
Kana stumbled a little at the shove, a strange expression on her face—but she soon realized the meaning of the gesture and softened into a smile. The Sodalyte flipped a faux wave, nodded to Galve, and turned about: walking deeper into the alleyways.
In the darkness, the drone was a silent menace. Save the soft crackle of her bubbles, she tread lightly and flexibly—swerving around garbage and debris like it was of no consequence to her. She climbed up walls, peered through windows, and examined air-drying clothesracks in the crack between the buildings until she found a suitable target.
An old woman, slumped against a brick wall and an old man.
The Sodalyte warped her body down the wall like a jelly gecko, her limbs stretching and compressing in unnatural ways. Without a second thought, she stuffed her hand over the woman’s mouth and shoved her fingers into her nostrils; muffling her instantly. She struggled and tried to beat the Sodalyte off of her, but Kana implacably stared at her—simply resting her one eye around the woman’s hands in case she grabbed a bladed weapon. It never came, however, and she slumped over - having asphyxiated into unconsciousness.
The Sodalyte pulled the torn clothes off of her back like a fallen mannequin, examining them carefully. After a bit of calculation, she investigated both the woman and the man’s pockets to see if they had anything she could use as a cutting instrument.
Bingo: the man had a pocket knife. Flicking a few lumps of decaying grime into the alley’s darkness, Kozakana got to work: trimming the cloth to her own specifications. Once she was done, she gripped the surface of her jumpsuit - inserting her fingers into the liquid.
After some convincing, the simplistic organism was coerced to go dormant: slipping beneath her membrane and then hardening again inside of her as a thick, dark ball. She left it below her stomach, where it would obstruct the least amount of flow, and slipped the rags over her—testing her reflection in a pool of murky filth.
Good. She looked like a vagrant.
After several more minutes of this, she’d picked up a number of things. Her clothes were now a ripped patchwork poncho made from the old woman’s garb and a pair of overlarge shorts from an abruptly-deceased drunkard. She wore a manacle and chains around her wrists from a metal recycling bin, and there was another attached to her neck like a metallic leash. From studying the humans, she’d picked up tics: learning to limp, to sag to one side as if her shoulder was tired, to drag her feet, to slouch, and to occasionally make wet, ragged imitations of coughing. Eventually, she felt satisfied—and she soon came limping out of the alleyway a changed woman to find Galve.
She hoped he wouldn’t ask where most of it would come from, much less where she’d found a liquefied human skin sample and human hair sample to jam into her body and hair-blobs respectively. The grime had covered up her cheek spots, but there was no helping her overlarge eye and strange, snouty facial proportions.
Then again, this was an extremely complex and unusual task for her. Most of it was intuitive, but the synthesis of all those individual simplicities was…
She breathed a rich breath of disgusting air as she limped forth from the alley.
…Indescribable. She had no idea how to think of it.
Galve's endeavour was far more direct than that of the Sodalyte. He stepped forth from the alley, avoiding being a center of attention to the greatest of his ability, and crossed streets and sidewalks till he arrived at his destination.
The building was a dresser and a tailor, white and purples inlaid with some dumb logo the ex-Dominion Private paid no attention to. He walked in through the automatic doorway, and was met by a man with a copper skintone, scraggly beard and thick grey handlebar moustache complimenting hair going down to the top of his neck. He wore a white-purple tailcoat suit with a baggy skirt-esque pair of pants that flowed down to his ankles before cutting off- bellbottoms. He nodded to Galve, and began to talk to him in a mixture of Highspeech and galactic basic.
"Greetings, I am known as Vergetti. What brings you here, Kathla?"
Galve responded in pure highspeech, hoping to seem more noble-esque: "Greetings. My calling is Jaren. I... Intended on visiting some Kathlai of mine this afternoon, but all of my nice outfits need cleaning, and my slave has been lacking lately. I was hoping to get something befitting."
"Well, then," he responded in tandem, switching to full highspeech. "You have come to the right place."
The greyhaired man led Galve to the back, and for quite some time they discussed things, measured galve's body, and tailored outfits. He explained away the extra two outfits he garnered as gifts for a similarly-sized friend of his, and their young daughter.
Not long later, he paid in millicents, and left the tailor. Out on the street, he locked eyes with Kana, and began to head over, putting on a facade of anger. He wore the outfit quite well, a flowing purple-white buttoned robe gave way at his midthighs to poofy, long trowsers a dark greyish black in colour. Past the edge of the pants and the sleeves of the robe, he wore white knee-high boots, and similarly-coloured silken gloves. On his right shoulder, a large false-metal pauldron matching the coat with an off-white, purple, and gold colouring to it sat on his shoulder. His head adorned a metal morion-styled helm with a silk purple interior, looking not dissimilar to a fancified conquistador helm. On his face, a digital overlay hovered in front of his eye, glowing softly purple onto his dark skin.
"You!" he called out, trying hard to put a false anger into his voice, "I've been hunting for you, get over here!"
Jaren grasped the chain that hung from Kana's neck, and with a look of silent apology on his face for a moment, continued the fake-angered yelling, "I'll have you sold off to the brothels if you dissapear again, slave," and tugged the chain, leading them farther into the city.
After a moment, he leaned in while none were looking, and whispered.
"I'm sorry for all this, Little Fish. You can get rid of all this once we've made it out."
Kana took a moment to stare at Galve and absorb his new look. She didn’t seem to recognize him—but the lights in her eye dawned when she heard his voice. It only lasted a moment, and she soon fell back into her wretched, twisted posture—simulating a choked grunt when the chain was pulled.
She glared at him with shockingly genuine emotion, quivered, and snarled—her eerily accurate skin-colored liquid forming a convenient backdrop to the dramatic contortion. ”Yes, Master.” She quietly replied, brimming and chilled with emotion as she was led off.
Once Jaren felt it safe to speak to her, Kozakana returned the favor. Though she did nothing to change her pained limp, the awkward lean of her falsely achy shoulders, or the dejectedly slow pace of her walk, she did speak perfectly normally. It was if someone were laying unfitting voicelines over an otherwise perfect character animation—for indeed, the juxtaposition felt totally jarring.
“There’s no need to apologize, Achy Bullet,” she responded, keeping a professional and conversational tone to blend in with the local soundscape. “This isn’t the first time I’ve done something like this. If it helps, remember that I don’t feel pain - even if I will-“
She grunted and choked, stumbling at a particularly rough pull of the chain. “-React as if I do.”
He nodded, and lifted himself up, staring straight ahead along the pathway as they took a turn. In an attempt to keep up the act, he grunted and tugged hard at the chain, and called out: "Walk Faster!"
They walked and walked and stepped and stepped along winding slumstreets, slowly the scenery changing to more clean and enunciated buildings, mixes of whites and purples and yellows and tans. People clammored along, some dressed in dirty tatters being dragged along by well-dressed masters, while others in normal clothes simply commuted about their day.
After some time walking, a smell hit their noses, salty and sweet and buttery and enticing; some sort of food vendor. Galve tugged Kana along the intended path, and brought them along the street. At the side of it, a small stand on some sort of hovering device handed out strange things- of which Galve recognized as food- to passerbys who stopped to pay. The Ex-Private brought them into line, and waited, eventually reaching the front. He paid in millicents, and spoke to the vendor.
"Gathi-Cal For Myself, and Nutritional Slop for that one," he hissed, nodding his head back to the short, disguised sodalyte in tow behind him. The Vendor simply nodded him, and handed the items to Galve, who promptly pulled them to the side and sat at a bench, motioning for Kana to take seat on the ground beneath with a harsh nod downwards with his head.
In his hands, he held a cheap bowl filled with some sort of meat, sauce, and potato-like foods, thick and rich and plopped atop a heaping pile of steamed grains; of some he had slipped into the bowl he handed Kana while none were looking.
What was given to the shackled sodalyte was a bowl of pasty pinkish-grey slop with no discernible chunks other than what looked like boiled meat and flavourless, wilted vegetables; of course, with some of the rich Gathi-Cal Galve had given. The Slop was rich in Calories, Vitamins, Protien, and other necessary and cheap things to keep a slave or a poor peasant running through the day, but it was nigh-flavourless.
"Eat up, we still have things to do."
Without wasting much time, Galve took a few bites of the Gathi-Cal, forcing himself to be slow as not to give away his false identity as a rich noble. There was a smile on his face from the food he remembered from years past, and he let out a deep breath as he stretched out in the chair, still keeping his posture straight.
Kana slumped down onto the ground next to Galve like a dejected ragdoll, hunching onto her raised knees and staring morosely at the ground. Her hollow eye only grazed his silhouette when at last he talked to her again, only to shove the disgusting soup into her face. The Sodalyte meekly accepted his offering, clutching it with trembling hands, and twitched her snouty face as she sniffed it.
She wasn't entirely sure how to react. Would a human dislike this? But then, how would they dislike it? Would it be a retch? A curl of the nose into an ugly wrinkle? Maybe even a broken, hollow smile? Torn between too many options and unable to prioritize any given one of them, she instead decided to simply hide her expression in the bowl—planting her face into it like a desperate pig. For the most part, the hunched posture helped to hide her body as it reacted to the slop: subtly shifting tones from the color of the melted skin she'd consumed to the vile concoction of her meal. Once she was finished, she popped a bubble of liquefied skin between her teeth; returning to the right color and unsticking her face from the rim with a sickly pop of grease and fluid.
Kozakana wiped her face onto her rags—partly for the added look, partly to make her seem more outwardly wretched, and partly to clear her sinusoidal skin—and then grimly cradled it upon her knees and in her hands.
"Can I keep it, master?" She croaked, miming the hollow pleas of another slave she'd heard further up the road. "Please, just this once?"
Behind the act, Kozakana had been thinking.
The wealth divide in this city was extremely noticeable. Kana had been paying careful attention to the differences in postures, composures, colors, smells, and styles between the lower and upper classes—and she'd noticed that it was almost night and day. She would have called such a thing an outright caricature of society on any of her preferred channels or feeds, and yet, it was here. It was here, it was real, and while it manifested differently, the concepts and foils were eerily familiar to her.
She idly wondered if the people of this planet would notice a single thing different with their social structure, had they been ruled by the Umi and not the Imperium. Would they even begin to settle into their old routines in time?
No.
No, that was just her trying to justify what she'd done back on Yyro: but why did it need justifying at all? Why was she thinking about it? There was no good data to extract from the idea—so why did she feel it continually gnawing at her like some kind of weed or root?
Something inside her felt wrong, but she still didn't understand what.
Galve peered around him, deducing no-one was looking, and quickly shoveled down the velvety meal in his hands, before wiping face clean with a napkin. He stood as Kana began to let out the false whines and pleads of an act, very convincingly so. Galve let out a sight of exhasperation, waving off the 'slave' beneath him and pulling with the chain.
"Fine." he hissed, believable malice dripping from his voice. "Keep it, but stop groveling, you're making me look bad."
It felt so odd to the ex-private. Having control, power, being at the top of society- even if it was an act he was putting on to avoid being killed or harmed. Having grown up at the bottom, dejected and cast away by those above him.
To be honest, it was awful. How could those Star-Forsaken nobles at the top of the ladder- chain?- pyramid?- feel good about themselves exploiting people. It was something that he may never understand. Something he would never want to understand. Just the act of pretending brought sickness and pain to his gut, and his senses screamed at him to just stop, to let go of the chain-
His train of through was chugging along as he walked them through a shadier part of town, oblivious to what was about to happen...
From the corners of Kana's one-eyed vision, some figures began to approach. First one, then two, then a third trailing them. One had their eyes on Galve's noble attire, and the other two on an odd-looking "slave" that would probably fetch them a lot of money were they to sell them on the auctions...
There was the schink of a blade as one of them took a long dagger from their belt, a and an ever-soft sizzle as the plasma sheath formed around it. The three let out soft chuckles, grinned, and began to get ever-closer- Galve still utterly oblivious.
Kozakana wretchedly gripped her now-empty and still slightly slimy bowl, limply shuffling behind her surrogate master. Still in the guise of a human, the Sodalyte glanced to the three now trailing behind them in the darkness, and she tried to think of how a human would react. She frantically looked to Galve as if to ask him something, stared balefully at her chain, and then suddenly stopped walking. The gooey little woman stood there, faux-gagging on her leash as she was pulled a few extra steps, and waited for Jaren to turn around and see her.
Hatred burned in her eyes, and hatred shook in her fists. Injustice pulled her posture upright like a broken puppet trying to stand, and although her entire body shivered with the simulated wrackings of near-starvation, she held her ground furiously.
"You," she whispered, raising the bowl with quivering fists. "If I just 'Turn My Life Around,' I'll finally be free of you." Kana chuckled, trying to make the implied message less obvious. That turned into a rough simulacrum of hysterical laughter: derived from manic, schizophrenic shrieking and ranting. Kozakana raised the bowl, an insane grin splitting her face nearly in half—
—And then she went totally deadpan to Galve, just before she shattered the bowl over the skull of the man with the knife. Kana screamed, pretending she'd been startled enough by him to change targets, and went scampering to Jaren's side with a shard of plastelain in her trembling grip.
"Two more," she muttered, slipping the dead pilot's pistol into his pocket from where she crouched. "Order me around realistically: we can't give up the act yet."
It all happened in an instant.
The man with the blade was screaming in agony, his two buddies shouting and beginning to run over towards them. Galve had turned around and started to shout at Kana with the fake worries of a slave-master who doesnt exist, before he scowled, took the pistol in his hand, and began to shout at her, keeping grip tight on the chain.
"You! Slave! Dont let those disgusting Morati touch me!"
While the man with the blade wasnt exactly dead, he was whimpering on the ground in pain, one of his comrades having grabbed the knife.
When she started to charge towards the seemingly-nobleman galve, he clenched the trigger, firing off a shot that- due to shaky hands and having hipfired- went wide and instead slammed into the seemingly unarmed thug behind the one brandishing the blade. He dropped with a scream and held at his leg, while galve shoved the pistol into his waistband and frantically pulling out his own blade.
The woman slammed into him, knocking the chain out of his hands and the breath out of his lungs, but he narrowly avoided being stabbed.
"Why you little...!" called out the injured thug that had previously held the Blade. With a grunt he began to stand up, grasping at a shard of razor-sharp glass from the street, and charged at Kana, hopping over the body of his injured comrade in sheer anger.
”Yes, Master,” Kana whimpered, reluctantly scuttling out from behind Galve to take up a meek defense. She scanned over the situation with her one eye, struggling for a moment where a combat model would have reacted on algorithmic instinct, and almost suffered a nasty slash to what would usually be a human’s jugular.
The Sodalyte bent her neck backwards at the base in an inhuman motion, locked her eye to the glass-bearing thug’s with a flash of evil intent, and then whipped around in a whorl of motion. A spray of liquefied human flesh slammed into the man’s face, and while he was stunned, the Sodalyte slipped the glass out from his fingers. She promptly merged it with her fist, sucked in a breath of air, and then swapped to a proboscis-fencing algorithm.
The crack of pressure from her motion hit only barely before the shard of glass was punched straight into his throat, ripping it open in a yawning spray just below the Adam’s Apple. Kana pulled the glass shard out with a flick, snapped her aim to the woman trying to savage Galve, and had to think again.
”Master?” She asked, taking on a traumatic shiver. ”D-Do you need help—?!”
Blood sprayed across the whole street, the glasswielding thug hit so hard and fast he had no time to even scream, his ruined throat simply letting out a choking burble.
Meanwhile, with galve, there were grunts of exertion, a yelp as the plasma singed one of his arms through the gap between his sleeve and glove. A few moments later, the Woman went still, let out a choked gasp, and a quiet Nghh.., while a wet slice and squishing motion sounded out. Galve drove the blade deeper into her gut, then ripped it up and out, unintentionally ripping her midsection open with a wide gash. He pushed the corpse off him, tossed his blade to the side, and stole the plasma blade- not long after it hit the floor and the sheath dissipated.
"You worthless bitch!" he yelled, venom in his voice- he had been getting better at the act- "Why would you ask something like that!? Of fucking course I need help, that is your sole purpose in life!"
He growled, bared his teeth, and gripped the chain once more. With a moment of hesitation, he reared his arm back above his head. As it came soaring down, Galve slapped Kana, the back of his hand striking the center of her face with all of his might- he knew it wouldnt do much to hurt her- and he let out a grunt of exertion. Galve tugged the chain, pulling them farther into the city as his boots clunked against the ground; the chain crinkling and jingling as they moved.
"Fucking pieces of shit..." he hissed, wiping glops of blood off of his still white suit, "I just fucking got this thing..."
Thankfully though, it seems it had been designed with violence (or bad weather) in mind- the outermost layers were hydrophobic, letting a majority of the blood slip away onto the floor.
Kana stumbled into the yank of his chain, her eye going wide and the glass clattering to the ground from her hand. Her entire head rippled with the impact—and with a delay just thin enough to be a reaction and not a boot period, the little Sodalyte yelped and cried out in pain.
She stumbled onto her face at the yank of his chain, barely able to scramble to her feet in time to keep up. The little one-eyed woman in her filthy little wrags was now shivering uncontrollably: both from the fight and the punishment afterwards. She gripped her chain with a haunted sadness, clinging to her prison as the only thing she still truly owned in this world.
Kana, meanwhile, was rather pleased. The whole operation had gone neatly, and they were well on their way to somewhere more respectable. Hopefully the pair hadn’t drawn too much attention.
The random bout of violence had surely attracted a large crowd in the small, dirty region of town. While fighting, theft, and other such scummy acts were common in the slums, this did not stop it from becoming an almost-daily spectacle in their lives. By the time Galve had hurriedly pulled Kana away from the scene- heading towards their intended destination- some of the onlookers had began to frantically loot what they could from the now-dead thugs that had tried to kill the pair.
Galve leaned down, breaking the facade of a noble slaveowner to speak to Kana about their next plan of action. “If we keep heading through this slum, we should be closer to the starport in the richer part of the city. Closer in we get, though, more likely we are to spot actual nobles who could see through my disguise, or Imperial Legions that might do the same. Once we start getting into that part, we’ll need to be even more careful,” he whispered, waiting a moment for the Sodalyte to respond before standing back up, straightening his shoulders once more.
Thankfully, no one had bothered to follow them after the scene in the street, the pair being left alone for the most part- poor slumdwellers mostly not wanting to mess with someone whom they believed to be a noble- it’d be treason, and death, in their eyes.
Within ten or so minutes of walking, stopping for bouts of begging or rage to keep up the facade, and occasional stops in more hidden alleyways to discuss things, the pair had arrived in the part of the city where the spaceport sat, and exited the shady slums. Shuttles pushed off of the ground with distant rumbles as purple lights shot off into the sky, likely cargo being brought to and fro- or nobles going on leisure cruises of some sort.
Before they could get excited, though, something began to cross their paths. With a gasp and a tug at the chain, galve pulled himself and kana into an alleyway, and around a thick stony corner, just as the thumping of metal boots kicking against the dirt road began to sound out. Peering around the corner, they saw a four-wide line of marching soldiers clad in shiny white-and-purple armour, with purple mohawk-like apparatuses sticking out of their sealed steel helms. The leading soldier- likely a commander- shouted out commands in Galve’s native language; Imperial High Speech.
“Stay down, and stay quiet,” he spoke in a quiet voice, lined with fear as his face darkened. “If they catch us, we’re dead. I shouldve just kept us going, but I panicked and now we’re hiding. Shit.”
”Why would they be suspicious of us if we avoid them?” Kozakana murmured back, balefully scanning them with her one eye. ”That’s strange. They should pay us equal attention compared to the rest of the street; shouldn’t they…?”
Something within Kana was practically bouncing for joy as she laid nearly-motionless against Galve’s side. It was a new language. Or, maybe a dialect. Or maybe an ancestor language of some kind. Whatever it was, it was something to decode—and her lips were already silently forming the words as she heard them. As she did-so, she thought to herself: formulating a few different plans in case things went sour.
If the guardsmen stayed, she considered, then they would have to find a means of escaping rationally. Kana could spread herself under the back of Galve’s coat and hide herself, even if it would be a little odd—or she could simply walk out with him as if the two had just been passing through. That could get them to the star port, and maybe she could finally get a disguise like his so she’d draw less ire. Or, perhaps she could dress up like the local flavor of automaton or servant? Difficult. There was also the matter of still drawing their ire, and her disguise wouldn’t hold up under close scrutiny.
If they left, it was no problem. The two could continue on their merry way—why had she considered that before the—nevermind. She re-shuffled her list of priorities, confirmed it, and moved on.
Worst-case scenario (should have began with that:) they either saw them dive away, saw them peeking, or simply come looking. They could kill them with some effort, but then what? Did they have dead man’s switches or communicators with silent alarms? What would they need bluffing against? Galve—his behavior would be seen as unnatural to them. Why would a nobleman dive behind an alleyway with his slave? Kana scanned across the day’s memories, scowling… …and then came to a logical conclusion.
She tapped Jaren’s shoulder, whispering again.
”Pretend I’m urinating,” she casually suggested, pulling into a convincing squat and just kind of sitting there. ”People take their slaves around corners to urinate like animals, right? Why else is there so much human waste in these alleys?”
Galve gritted his teeth, pondering their options. He didn't have much of a better idea, to be honest, but he disliked it greatly.
"That... I don't have any better ideas. We'll pull around the corner, walk away, and if any of them question me, that's the story." he said, nodding in agreement.
He took a deep breath, grasped the chain tightly, and put on a sour face, washing away his fear. After a few moments of standing there, Galve pulled the chain and began to walk around the corner nonchalantly, a slowness and deliberateness to his steps, although a bit of hesitation. He peeled to the side and began walking back towards the starport, in the opposite direction the legionnaires were marching.
They got a while of walking, before they were stopped.
A legionnaire, clad in his heavy armour, approached galve. There was no aggression in it, but he still moved towards him; it seemed to be some sort of officer whom wasnt marching in the formation; someone important.
"You," he said in High Speech. "Why did you go into the alley when we approached the street?" the soldier asked galve. The question felt more like it was done out of boredom than suspicion- maybe this march was such a routine that even the commanders despised it.
Galve took a breath, and smiled lightly, a sour smile that you would see in a noble being second-guessed.
"The Morati by me needed to relieve itself," replied galve, speaking in the same language the Legionnaire spoke, an odd regality to his voice brought on simply by the language he was speaking. His accent was noticably more soft compared to the hard gruffness of the soldier. "Isnt that correct?" he asked kana, his face turning into disgust as he tugged at the chain and looked down at her, before peering back up to the Legionnaire.
Kana, of course, parroted the strangled noise of a slave being yanked around on their leash. She stumbled slightly, jerking her fingers and arms in visible pain, and looked up to the legionnaire with her one, big eye. She wondered if the dark hair she'd stolen would be enough to mask her bizarre anatomy - but of course, that was down to the guard's own vision and what exactly these Morati tended to look like. So far, Kozakana had only seen human and humanoid varieties of a near-human type: so she could only guess.
"Y-Yes," she whimpered, remembering and enacting a hollow and terrible stare that she'd seen one of the female Morati giving to a guardsman. "I-I just needed to... I-I... Y-Y... Yes..."
The Sodalyte bowed, thinking again. How quickly could she choke him to death? Where were the joints in his armor? How difficult would it be to simply bash him unconscious with a one-inch punch of pressure and ferocity? Could she without the use of a sharp implement, or would the contact of even her fist disperse the force too much? She ran through the possibilities in her head, silently praying that the melted skin and hair she'd ingested would be enough to fool the guardsman. She almost prepared to suck in a breath of air-pressure, and then paused with a sudden shock of realization.
Bubbles, she thought. If he sees me developing bubbles, he'll know for sure. I can't even pressurize myself if I don't want to blow our cover.
She considered a human expletive for the situation, cycled through a few languages she'd heard on Yyro, and then settled for a suitably vile summation of the situation:
Shit.
The soldier nodded once, and finished walking towards them, now barely a foot away from Kana, and half a head taller than even galve.
"Very well then," he said, seeming to buy the excuse for now. Despite this, he did not leave, and instead roughly grabbed Kana's face at the chin, pushing her to look up at him. "Quite the odd one you have, not seen a thing like it." he noted the odd, non-human biology of the sodalyte. Though, he sounded more astonished than suspicious- maybe having non-human slaves was a sign of vanity here?
Galve scowled, and- very lightly- grasped the soldier's hand, and pulled it off of Kana, before pushing the sodalyte back a bit. It was almost instinctual, and now he had to come up with an excuse.
"Hey-" the soldier was cut off.
"Careful not to touch a noble's things," Galve spoke over-top of him, holding his chin up and straightening his shoulders, "You may protect the star and the Realm, but respect is still due for I and my property." he said coldly.
"Apologies, Sir. I'll bother you no longer." the soldier politely responded, then walked away with a sigh. There goes his one entertainment for the march, Galve thought, then kept walking, still seemingly annoyed at the audacity of the soldier. Galve then turned to Kana and whispered.
"Im annoyed he grabbed you, but apparently they dont seem to care if you're human or not. Shouldve known, but I never bothered much attention to the nobles when I still lived here. Keep the disguise, though- you being bright red would just attract more unwanted attention." he said, continuing down the street. A few blocks down, the flowing, monolithic off-white form of the spaceport- dotted with glowing purple lights- stood, the entrance visible, and various vendors selling the deeds and rights to ships or tickets offworld were in fancy booths of the same colour, the rooves of the booths seemingly flowing out of the form of the spaceport like a wave of off-white and purple.
Almost out of here.
Kozakana corrected her assessment of the situation with a sigh of pressure. Not shit. If anything, this was excellent - but then Galve said the words she'd been dreading.
'...Should've known...'
The Sodalyte scowled, whispering to him in a low, burbling tone as they walked down the valley of the city street toward the mountain reigning over it. "You didn't know?" She hissed, her voice still totally incongruent with her expression and demeanor. "Achy Bullet, you are my only ally and confidante in this world, and I want to... to..."
She paused, thinking of a word as they came toward the ticket booths, and shot him a filthy look. "Strangle. That's what it is. I want to strangle you. The next time we end up in a situation like this, I'm making you the filthy, unkempt slave." Kozakana trembled under the shadow of the multicolored roofs as they passed beneath them, trying to demonstrate reluctance to go into such a high-class area. With a yank of the chain and a strangled gasp, however, she was back on her way; and she settled into line by crawling onto the ground and slouching into a cross-legged slump that left her looking even tinier than usual. Galve, however, might have recognized it as something more significant:
Was she pouting at him? Really? Right now, of all times?
There was a sharp inhale of breath as Galve faltered for a moment, his mask dropping for a moment. He pursed his lips, breathed out slowly, and began moving forwards again, bringing up the lie again as his face turned to passive annoyance once more- a twinge more genuine.
"You really think that-" he stopped himself, and shook his head. "No. We can talk about this later."
Without another word, they entered the spaceport's marketplace. It was bustling and vibrant compared to the dreary dullness of the previous slums and cityscape, neon signs hanging from the entrances to small tents or the openings of booths, bright even through the fading daylight as evening began to set in- the planet's sun softly fading down beneath tall skyscrapers in the horizon. It was a loud place, and such a busy place that less effort needed to go into their disguises; the pair was able to get some semblance of relaxation now as they walked around.
One vendor caught Galve's eye in particular. He seemed to have a very small crowd at his booth, just a couple nobles- some with, some without slaves. He nodded to no one specific, then began to move forwards towards the vendor. While Kana idled about, keeping the disguise up, Galve discussed terms with the vendor and eventually was able to get a good price for a ship- a decent chunk of his SIGEC reserves, but a good ship nonetheless. Nearly twenty minutes after the fact, he nodded goodbye to the vendor, and guided them into the crowded spaceport, not saying anything to Kana quite yet.
Another thirty minutes, they breached through the crowd and into a small launchpad area, a digital key on Galve's holopad unlocking it. The lights flickered on, and a ship came into view. It was quite large compared to their previous ride, standing tall enough to have two floors, and looked to be about thirty meters, at least. It was a sleek thing, coming to a point at the front and widening out to a thin pair of V-shaped wings, and a V-tail, with a large fin on the back that was most likely the ship's hyperspace fin, something found on most Imperial vessels. And most notably, on it's chin was a turret- flush with the front, a wide barrel jutting out with holes in the side similar to what you might see on a coilgun of sorts, but it was a bit off.
"Well, here she is," Galve said, closing the door behind them. He dropped the chain, and smiled.
"So what will we name her?"
Feeling safe in the confines of the launchpad, Kozakana dropped the facade of her posture. The little Sodalyte stepped around the ship, silently marveling at it with her one eye. Her cheek-spots almost shone crimson through the grime she'd caked onto them, unable to hide such an extreme color shift. She marveled at the vessels' sleek lines, and its flush panels - she ogled the turret and landing gear with utter fascination. When she finally felt satisfied, Kana came back around to Galve; a subtle, warm grin brushed upon her cute little face.
"She's incredible," she breathed, turning back to the ship with her big eyes sparkling. "I... I don't know. I've never been asked to name anything before, especially not something as important as... I... um..."
The Sodalyte just stared at it, making a few alien warbles and burbles in place of full words. She tried to articulate what she wanted, failed, and then tried again, her arms folded before her chest and one hand rolling and gesturing. At last, she came to a decision and turned to Jaren with a curious look.
"There's a metaphor," she explained, furrowing her eyebrows. "I heard a soldier on Yyro use it. It was... It was... It was something about fabric. Fabric, covers... night..." She rubbed her round chin, thinking, and then recalled it with a jubliant warble.
"Night!" She exclaimed. "The Cover of Night." For a name?"
He mused over the name for a moment, letting it sink in, whispering it to himself a few times. He nodded, before responding.
"That.... Yeah. That sounds pretty good," he said as he stepped forwards. He turned towards kana, and grabbed at that awful chain necklace, undoing it and moving it to the side. Out from under his arm he carried the set of clothes he'd been wearing, and passed them off to kana, letting her have the small bundle. "Change out of those rags whenever you get the chance," he explained, then held out his hand. "You still got a hold of the AI's core?" he asked.
He thought for a moment as he waited, and then smiled, looking over the Sodalytes face, before his eyes lit up as he remembered what he had wanted to say.
"Also, you can drop the disguise, now," he commented, "you look better in that red colour of yours anyways."
Kana warbled a sigh of relief, sucking up a red bubble from within her liquid body and popping it between her teeth. The particles raced across her interior in a froth, her systems rapidly shifting and flexing to resemble the new input. By the time she was finished, she had returned to that gleaming, Neon red of hers - though she frowned at a small discrepancy.
The Sodalyte poked her gooey ‘hair,’ blinked, and then stuck her hand through the membrane of her head. The temporary divider broke, and the fizz raced up the rest of the way - completing her look with a flourish and a hiss. She studied the clothes Galve had given her, eying the dark pants, the white boots, the silken gloves, the robe, and the headgear and pauldron in turn.
She promptly tossed the helmet and pauldron aside, laid out the boots, gloves, and pants, and put her hands atop the trousers. Kana spread a thin layer of acid across a few points of the cloth, melting openings here and stretching and pulling it there. By the time she was done, it was something closer to a set of strapless, sleeveless overalls - and she nodded in satisfaction. The Sodalyte reached down to begin undressing, blinked, and then paused.
“...Is it… appropriate to do this in front of a human?” She looked up to Galve, her mouth cocked to one side. “I’ve seen some undressing in front of others, but I’ve also seen some hiding while they do it. The custom is… still foreign to me.”
Galve watched curiously as the sodalyte began to deconstruct and modify the garments he had procured for her, the acid burning the trousers into an odd shape, before she began to reach down-
There was a sharp intake of breath, and galve bit his lip once more, ready to turn around as his face darkened slightly. "...I-It depends," he stuttered out, before shaking his head. "Now, probably not. ..I can explain it later, alright? Just, i'll head onto the ship and you do that. Oh, and-" he turned about and began walking to the ship with an awkwardly hurried pace, "-dont forget to have the AI out and ready when you get in here so we can jack him in!"
The door to the ship hissed open as he stepped in, wanting to peek over his shoulder but instead steeling forwards, the door remaining open behind him. The inside of the ship took on a soft, shiny silver colour with lining of the everpresent imperial purple, empty "photograph" screens flat black and sticking out from the rest of the wall, with fake screen-windows to the outside powered off with the rest of the ship. Galve thumbed a button near the entrance as he stepped in, drawing power from the batteries to turn on the lights of the ship and all other basic systems like screens and reactor controls.
He peered to his right and saw the door to the cockpit, and began to stride towards it.
Kana shrugged as Galve turned away, already peeling away the rags draped over her glassy membrane's surface.
. . .
Kana came into the cabin just as Jaren was exiting it. The Sodalyte opened her mouth, about to tell him she'd finished, but surprised herself by pausing and absorbing the architecture of the place. Really, she reflected, that's what human ships like these are. Buildings and homes in the air. She traced her fingers along one of the machine's beveled corners, scanning over its composition and angles with her single eye.
Flashes of memories bubbled up from the fractured pieces of her hole-punched past, but she dismissed them as she walked toward the cockpit door. It was like the brutalism of her homeland, but at the same time, there was a curious opposition. It wasn't a place designed to feel cramped, or oppressive, or restrictive. It wasn't a directionless, algorithmic mesh: calculated for some arbitrary set of rules and regulations that twisted it into some Escherian labyrinth. It was a space designed with a center. It was designed with people; with organisms in mind.
She was at once blanketed in its mirror finish and totally alienated by the minds which had designed it.
Kana pushed through the door to the cockpit, trying to rid herself of the odd feeling swirling in her mix. She caught sight of Galve working out the layout and controls and called to him, spreading her arms in a presentational way.
"...How do I look?"
Kana had dulled the colors of the fabric as she'd melted and altered it. Laid against her neon-red skin, the trousers had been morphed into a set of ash overalls that rode up just under the Sodalyte's arms. She wore the white boots and gloves as they were, covering her limbs like flared extra-sleeves: and she'd turned a scrap of the purple robe into a lavender scarf.
"I extrapolated some of the fashion I saw in the advertisements," she explained, sliding her gaze around the cabin in a smooth line that betrayed her artificial nature. "...I... hope it's satisfactory."
By the time Kana had made her way to the Cockpit of the ships, the reactor had already been warmed up sufficiently, and all the lights and systems had been booted up properly. He was fiddling with some controls when he heard the door hiss open, and turned around expectantly. His eyes went wide for a moment, looking over kana's new outfit, before he coughted and smiled.
"U-uhm, yeah," he responded, not sure what to say. "You look great, Kana. I like yo- It, the outfit."
He nodded to the copilot seat to his right, and turned around once more with a sigh, shaking his head slightly. Between them, a port whirred open that seems like it would fit with the AI that Kana still held in herself. Galve didnt say anything about it, and presumably expected her to remember what to do.
"So, Kana? Ready to get out of this... Cesspit? Now that we have our own ship, we can go anywhere we want!" Galve waved his arms out widely. "Only problem is, we're gonna need to find some sort of job, a way to pull in income. Fuel isnt free, afterall."
He frowned, and turned towards the sodalyte. Looking into her eyes a while, the frown dissolved, and he waved his worries away.
"Im sure we can find something. Afterall, nothing's stopped us yet, right?"
Kozakana's cheek-spots flushed a vibrant pink at Galve's compliment. She nodded at his gesture, came to sat down, and opened her hand: revealing the solid-state cylinder in which Revo was engraved. The Sodalyte examined its translucent surface curiously, peering into the prismatic labyrinth of data-faces held within, and turned to Jaren with a smile.
"There's always work somewhere," she observed, sliding the data-cylinder into its pencil-sized receptacle. "You have a strong body, you can fly a ship: I'm flexible, I can freely produce chemicals. I'm not sure about how useful we might be intellectually, wherever we go, but I do know this..."
She put a gloved hand on his lap, her eyes still basking in his.
"We make a good pair, Achy Bullet. That, and..." She looked away a little sheepishly, burbling to herself in something that sounded like the vague imitation of a laugh. "And, if everything else fails, we're both very good at killing people."
He smiled brightly at the sodalyte, nodding in thanks as she inserted Revo into his slot. Nothing happened, yet, maybe the AI was waiting to make his appearance once more.
"Yeah, youre right..." he said. "We can find something to do. If we can, though, I would rather avoid killing..." he said somberly. "But, beggars cant be choosers, i guess."
He placed his own gloved hand atop hers, and let out a sigh. "How about Natar? Dont know much about it, but ive heard it's one of the most prosperous places in the galaxy, and it's probably got good work, one way or another. Should be able to find something there, yeah?"
There was a beeping from the console, and a holo-projector popped up with Revo's form. He was grinning, as ever, and spoke loudly in his signature drawl.
"Natar, eh? Sounds like a good idea to me. Got myself hooked up to the ancnet, and it sure is a place to go for work. Just, 'careful where you step, place is rampant with organized crime. Dont get caught up in anythin' you cant get us out of, aye?"
Galve acknowledged the AI with another nod. He lifted his hand and softly placed it on Kana's cheek. He held it there for a while, before he pulled away. "Should probably sit down and strap in, Little Fish. Gonna pull us out of this place. Once we jump, we'll have time to explore the ship a bit more, talk about things.
He turned in his seat, and began to strap himself in, flicking up a display. There was a slight rumble and the ship began to lift up off the ground while Kana moved to the copilot chair..
"That sounds good to me."
The Sodalyte settled into her seat with a gelatinous wobble, eyed its restraints, and quietly selected the 'dwarf' option with a confused look. Her eyes went wide as the setup on her side shifted; zero-tolerance joints and seams expanding and contracting various pieces of the control center to place them in her reach. She made a warbled, frustrated noise, and tried to settle back into the thing now that it'd jostled her around. After a bit of work, she relaxed: flowing backward into the thing's cushioning as the ship began its acceleration.
"What," she said, after some quiet thought, "is the... Enk-Net? Is it like a local air network?" She frowned, trying to parse the text on screen. "And is there a monochrome option?" She mumbled, furrowing her eyebrows. "I keep reading the letter edges as... As..." The Happosei faltered, staring at the display, and went quiet.
"Sodalyte text," she said, a dark numbness twinging her words.
Why do I want to tell him?
She looked at Galve, her cheek-spots blanched so clear that one could use them to stare through her body like windows. It could ruin things. It could make him hate me: it could do all sorts of damage. So why... What's trying to make me speak?
She opened her mouth into a small hump, constructing her mono-teeth as her lips parted, and found herself shocked at the noises she was making.
"Galve," she said, something foreign and soft blanketing the word. "I—"
"Ancnet's the thing connectin' the whole wide galaxy, miss," the AI responded politely. In front of her, a small holo-display flickered up, and on it images of different famous places or faces in the galaxy appeared. Shortly after, it disappeared. "Just about anything you wanna know? 'net's got it."
Meanwhile, galve let out a groan as the weight of thrust pushed him down. Usually, Antigrav wouldve corrected it, but for some odd reason the imperials had programmed it to only function in space. Safety, maybe. He pressed hard on a few buttons before Revo got the prompt and finally flicked it on forcefully. The weight left his chest, and kana was no longer being pushed into the seat's cushioning.
"Ah, shit, I hate physics." he said shaking his head as the ship pushed farther up into the atmosphere, the hellish city becoming naught but a circle in the distance, blending in with the surrounding mass of slums. He turned his attention to the little-fish, while still paying attention to the flight.
"Yeah, Kana? Something wrong..?" he asked.
"I can take the wheel, kiddo," prompted Revo. Galve nodded, and let go of the controls. The sky darkened ever more around them, and the planet got ever smaller. Galve turned his chair, undid the belts, and leaned forwards to kana, not saying anything yet.
"A-About... About..."
About Yyro? Was she going to do this right now? Kana could feel her thoughts physically slowing down, as if the stress were dragging time to a standstill. She wobbled as the belts zipped away, folding her hands between her plump legs and staring through them into nowhere.
"About... Yyro. D-Did I.... Did... I....."
She frantically tried to parse the situation, her eyebrows furrowing. Why was she doing this? Why did she feel the need: the compulsion to do it? What was Galve to her? Why had she stuck with him? Why hadn't she looted his corpse after they'd escaped Yyro, or ditched him at the first sign of the ship and had the AI take over? It didn't make sense. It wasn't in her program: but then, neither was that kiss.
Electric. Overwhelming. The things that she'd lost: in some way, their broken pieces had been replaced by that kiss. She'd read Galve's DNA: She'd absorbed it into herself. Somewhere in her, some of it had been used as a scaffold. Somewhere, that X-factor was boiling in her liquid. As she was about to unleash it, however, something else took over her mind.
"...Fission material." She realized, blinking slowly. Her tone shifted like the rapid impacts of a gear shift. "Did I... ...I told you I need fission material, right...?" She desperately hoped the segue was smooth enough to fly past, but somehow, she doubted things would be so clean.
He could tell something was wrong by the way the soda held the expression on her face. Something was wrong, and she.. Wasnt telling him. Maybe it was important, maybe it wasnt. He'd find out eventually, but if she felt the need to pull back like that, now probably wasnt the time.
"I wont push, but, at some point, we can talk about whatever it was you were going to tell me."
He then processed what she had said to change the topic. Fissile material.... He vaguely remembered her mentioning it before, sometime on Yyro. "Yeah, I think you did. Once we've jumped, we can search the ship for something. If not, well, human food should be able to keep you functioning until we can buy some, right?" he inquired, nodding. "We should be j-"
"Well, Fuck!" Revo grunted as the ship accelerated harder than before. The screens at the front of the ship flickered, showing some sort of message. Galve's eyes went from confusion, to absolute despair as he turned to face the front, buckling back in.
The lights of the ship dimmed to red as the alert played on the screen.
"Revo, get us the fuck out of here, now!"
"Calm yerself, I'm doin' m'god damned best! Hold on!"
The ship accelerated more, as its thrusters began to push it to its limits already. In the distance, images of a massive warfleet began dropping into the system, their weapons crashing into Imperial warships. The Dominion. They were here, fighting the Imperium. Almighty hope they can escape from this.
"Hyperdrive's almost Ready!" called out Revo. Galve reached over, and offered his hand to the sodalyte, looking over at her.
Kana nodded, wincing. Of course he'd noticed; there was about an eighty per-cent chance he would.
She then opened her eyes wide, confused at the colors and symbols on-screen. The Sodalyte opened her mouth and closed it again, frantically trying to parse the text as she flipped her own restraints over herself. As she did so, she yelled over the cacophony that had enveloped them.
"Galve!?" She gripped his hand in both of hers, staring into his eyes with one filled with questions, fears, and calculations. "Galve, what's happening!? Is the ship going to survive? What's a Dominion?" For the first time in a long time, she had no knowledge base about the situation. No memories, no programming; nothing. The unknown loomed in front of her, wider and blacker than Space itself: and Jaren could see its ugly tendrils widening her pupil and accelerating the pulse of her 'breath.' Faster, faster: like she was hyperventilating.
"Hey, hey, kana," he tried to reassure her. The fear was palpable on his face, and in the air, sweat beading down his face as he too found himself on the verge of hyperventilating. This wasnt good, this wasnt good at all. But she- she needed him to be calm. He took a deep breath.
"Its okay, Kana, Its gonna be okay. I'll tell you everything later, i just need you to calm down for me, okay?"
He let her squeeze his hand, giving an equal reaction with his own hand. Before he could say anything else, though, the world melted away and the weight of the world was shoved onto their chests; they entered into hyperspace.
It'll all be okay...