Survive – Part one
"You idiot!"
A male Yautja smacked the masked head of his companion and rumbled with a rage that could only be matched by his terror.
"You absolute…"
The Yautja stopped for a moment struggling to find a word strong enough to articulate his anger, though he was so flustered that he ended up saying basically the same thing he had already yelled.
"…imbecile! Do you realise what you've done?"
He pressed the action home by taking hold of and shaking his blood-brother.
"We're going to be exiled for this… If not outright killed." Tensely he let go and began pacing the metal flooring.
Currently he was grilling one of his brothers and was debating very heavily on killing him to wipe away the shame of his colossal fuck-up.
Finally finding his voice the masked Yautja spoke up to his older brother; "Look… Yu'icha I know that this is bad… But sometimes…"
He paused searching for some form of wisdom to assuage his brothers wroth.
"Even Elder Tawana says 'a hunter can lose many things even before a hunt and shame is not necessarily to follow.'"
The quote from one of Tawana's sermons was not as powerful as Tragg thought it would be, and rather than have a peaceful effect it exacerbated Yu'icha's already strained emotions further.
"How could you lose five serpent chrysalises?" He roared.
The obnoxious lack of expression from Tragg's mask made Yu'icha raise his fist and prepare to bring it down into the blank metal 'face' of his brother.
The whoosh and whirr of the sealed bulkhead door to the room opening caused the two males to look at the figure now passing through.
Entering into the cabin an exceptionally large Yautja was bearing a plate full of freshly cooked food.
He looked up and furrowed his brow, clicking his tusks quizzically before finally breaking the awkward silence.
"Am I interrupting?"
His voice boomed even though he didn't mean for it to, but it was because Gharack was large, even by Yautja standards.
He stood just a short distance below the doorway and often had to duck when entering some rooms and buildings.
His muscles and sheer strength made him well sought amongst the females even for a few hours of company.
He could fell trees with his bare hands, and in his youth he would practise lifting them for sport.
He lifted anything actually, tree trunks, large kills, boulders. He even lifted a small Yautja space craft once while he and his brothers were drunk on sour-wine.
Gharack tore some muscles and gave himself a hernia, but he did it.
Though his strength was great Gharack learned from his teachers that he was never to rely on one tool or one weapon too much.
And ever since he was a pup he was whipped into being a multi-disciplinary Yautja.
Gharack read, and he wrote, he asked questions, and he did a variety of things that were not typical to a young male Yautja's interests.
For all intents and purposes Gharack was an odd-duck.
The largest of the three Yautja brothers was also uncharacteristically calm for a Yautja. A quality which always left him ostracized by his kind, even without his mask he was impossible to read, which made him dangerous.
By comparison his brothers were hotheads, but their natural fear of Gharack coupled with their respect of his age, rank, and personal prowess ensured their loyalty and faithful obedience to his word.
He'd just finished preparing his dinner when he'd walked into the large cabin and into the argument, or fight, he was unsure, between his two younger brothers.
"Well… uh." Yu'icha started.
Then he smacked Tragg and pointed to Gharack, "Why don't you tell him?"
"Tell me what…" Gharack repeated.
Tragg started up… "Look… I went down to…" He stuttered, "I-I, well I went down and I c-checked the stasis pods."
Gharack shoulders tensed and his hands gripped his metal plate tighter.
"It looks like… well I mean…"
Yu'icha pushed his brother and took over the explanation, "The serpent chrysalises are gone… You know the ones we were supposed to deliver?"
The oldest of them nearly dropped his food as he took a step backwards.
"What do you mean; 'gone'?" He finally managed to get out.
Yu'icha wrapped his hand onto his younger brother's neck, "Well! This one went down to check them before we made ready to leave the station, and they were not where we left them..."
Tragg fought under his brother's grip and threw off his heavy hand.
"…He looked and looked and just came up to tell me now."
Gharack put his food down on the nearest flat surface and he took a deep breath, "Who could have possibly known we had them on the station other than us?"
Tragg winced, and then the two unmasked brothers looked at him.
He painfully began to speak.
"I may, may have let slip to a female on the station that we were transporting something very dangerous…"
Yu'icha's eyes widened and he drew his wrist blades, "We're going to be exiled because you tried to impress a pair of teats!"
He lunged at his younger brother in a rage and Gharack leapt in to stop him.
"I'm going to kill you Tragg! I'm going to kill you!"
Grumbling and roaring to out-display Yu'icha, Gharack began speaking, "No one is killing anyone!"
Yu'icha stared into his brothers bright yellow eyes, wordlessly challenging him but eventually he took a breath and finally relented, retracting his weapons.
Stepping back from Tragg, Yu'icha ran his hands along his face and crest, anxiously breathing and rubbing his face. He ended the action by flicking his dreadlocks back off his shoulders. And gruffly spoke;
"What do we do Gharack?"
The oldest brother stood and carefully stroked his bottom left mandible.
"It's all going to be okay."
He clapped his hands together before continuing;
"It's simple… we will track this female down and find out what she's done with our property, right?"
The two brothers agreed with their older leader and nodded, "Right…"
Nodding Gharack lowly continued,
"With any luck she'll still be on the station…"
Turning back to the heavy bulkhead door Gharack led his two brothers through the open passage and down the connecting hallway.
They'd make their way to the main section of the space station and start their search there and Gharack vocalised as they began entering into the connecting terminal.
"We'll go landing bay by landing bay and ask every one of the harbour masters if they've seen her or anyone else loading large stasis-pods."
Tragg spoke up meekly, "A-and if she's left the station with our cargo?"
Turning to his younger brother Gharack pointed his large index finger, "Then you will make our ship ready for launch and we are going to chase her down."
Grumbling Tragg reluctantly kept close to the stomping of his older brothers.
This drama of stolen goods occurred inside a Yautja way-station of sorts.
It was a place for clan ships, and hunting parties to come, mingle, stretch their legs, trade, and store items; at a cost.
In addition to these and a few other services, it was agreed upon neutral territory.
Sanctified by many aged and holy traditions Yautja had been coming to it for centuries, using it on many occasions to broker peace and agreements that would otherwise have wiped out whole clans.
The station itself was plain, but massive, designed with attention to replicate the feeling of a city turned inside, though to call it a 'city' is to embellish its size.
All in all the station could support maybe five hundred living, breathing, Yautja at one time. Though the era of that many Yautja in one place, other than the home world, was long since gone.
At present there were just a few hundred Yautja on board, and of that around half were staff who lived, and worked aboard the satellite.
It was built into a large asteroid floating somewhere along the Orion Arm of the Milky Way. It circled a small star and had been outfitted with technology and thrusters to create its own spin, ensuring that the small star wouldn't over heat or wipe away the Yautja clinging to the rock.
The three brothers, Gharack, Yu'icha, and Tragg had been tasked by an old, very old, Yautja Chief with bringing him a clutch of serpent eggs, the elderly master had sought to blood his youths before he died, and had hoped to do so with the use of some serpents.
The compensation that the brothers were set to receive after delivering the contraband was going to help propel them into a position and status from which they'd be permitted to do or get away with almost anything.
Serpent eggs were tightly monitored and in all seriousness, now quite rare within Yautja space, there were a few game-preserve planets that had been set up by Yautja which were now entirely dominated by the nasty xeno-morphs.
And so it strayed very close to 'bad blood' territory to handle or even come into possession of serpent eggs unless you were specifically tasked as a guardian by an elder council.
Chrysalises however were different, and if caught by hunters and frozen were very rich prizes indeed.
In a way Gharack and his brothers provided a necessary service to many clans that would otherwise have a hard time of doing things; especially in organising serpent-based hunts.
For many the three Yautja brothers were couriers; taking odd jobs, bounties, and requests from various Yautja clans.
Now… with all this being said, one might think 'if the chrysalises were so important maybe one of the Yautja brothers should have been guarding them.'
Which is entirely valid, but in Gharack's experience, labeling their cargo with innocuous manifests such as: 'Grain bushels' or 'Metal slag' ensured not only the way station asked no questions, but that possible thieves would keep well enough away.
This was just one time where the three boys got unlucky, and Tragg said something to someone that he shouldn't have.
However, millions of miles away, on a distant planet, which was occasionally used as a Yautja hunting spot, a drama of a whole other sort was unfolding.
-1-
Naomi Huang was getting married.
And while a marriage is supposed to be a happy occasion, her impeding nuptials were not.
It wasn't her first choice of man; in fact she didn't really get any choice at all, it was a pressured and rushed kind of situation to be clear.
While at university she had been going out with this hotshot, and hotheaded, E-trader from Hong Kong, there were several times she wondered to herself why she was even going out with this guy to begin with. But for better or worse she stuck in the relationship.
Then her parents found out about it.
And that did not help the issue at all.
Her family had emigrated from China to the United States for the promise of freedom from an overarching tyranny and the idea of a better life for themselves and their children.
But they ended up replicating the same kind of tyranny they fled in Naomi's life.
They controlled her in almost every way, even down to what she could and could not wear.
University however was an escape and a place she was finally able to break free, if only for a little while; which begged the question if it was worse for her to have tasted a little freedom before being imprisoned again, or never at all.
But regardless of all that, at university she did make friends and connections, mostly to people who were like her; children stuck in between two cultures.
Though ultimately it was through a friend of hers from university that she came to meet her now fiancé. Of course she didn't blame that friend now for what ended up happening, it wasn't their fault.
How could they have known what was going to transpire in Naomi's life?
Naomi was meek, and had the decided inability to assert herself.
Towards her friends sometimes
To her family all the time
And to this man she was now set to marry, always; and worse than that it was going to be expected as part of the marriage pact, in practise if not in traditional vows.
Her mother and father fawned over him when they first met him.
Naomi had hoped that it would never have happened but it was a horrible coincidence that revealed the fact their daughter was dating someone to her parents;
One of the few times that Yue, her fiancé, took her out on a date some family friend of her parents must have seen them.
But the point was it somehow got back to her Mother and Father, and next thing she knew they demanded to see him.
They met him and immediately gave the union their seal of approval.
In a way Naomi thought that everyone in her life was in on a sort of conspiracy to deliberately sabotage her chances at autonomy;
Her boss regularly took advantage of her, her family did what they did, and now Yue was riding high on how luckily he had scored with her as his soon to be bride.
All in all Naomi Huang was drowning, and her anxiety never let her forget it.
Wave after wave would hit her and it sunk her deeper into a lonely place, somewhere she was begging for anything or anyone to do something about.
Even though she wasn't actually articulating these thoughts aloud, deep down in her chest she could feel it.
In a horrifying way something was coming that was going to very greatly change her life.
But until then she had to try and keep her cool.
She had to hang on and stay waiting.
If she was to speak with her parents she had to use Chinese, since her parents had come from Hunan province, her dialect was Xiang. Which caused no end of irritation for Naomi as her friends would constantly ask her to speak with people behind counters in restaurants, or in shops.
And she would explain, for the umpteenth time, that Chinese was not one language; there were tons, and they even changed dialects depending on how old a person was.
When she was younger she took a small sense of pride at being a speaker of such a unique and rare dialect, especially growing up in the United States, but now it was more and more a bother.
Especially if she encountered someone through her work that'd see her last name, then they'd try speaking with her in Mandarin, and she'd respectfully have to direct them back to English. Though even that was sometimes hard for her to get out she felt so shy and put-upon.
Clearing her throat she caught the attention of her mother, who was, at present, speaking with the floral coordinator.
The three women stood in the middle of the empty ballroom of the small, but exclusive, hotel that her parents along with her fiancé Yue had rented.
Her mother stood hand on hip waiting for her daughter to speak,
This was the first time she had said anything the whole time they were meeting with the floral coordinator.
"But Mother… I, I really don't like those…"
She was so flustered she'd forgotten the name of the arrangement that her mother was pushing for.
With her well-practised and condescending tone her mother snapped back, "Nonsense! Your cousin Sheng's wedding had the same ones and every other bride was envious. We will have the same but bigger."
The floral girl stood by awkwardly, clutching her clipboard and looking down at her notes.
Naomi nodded, "R-right… It's just, I was hoping for some pink carnations… They're my favourite and-"
Her mother's hand cut her off, "Please! Don't be silly, that is not a proper flower and I will not have them at my youngest child's wedding."
And with that it was over, and Naomi knew well enough not to try and interject again.
Quietly she looked downwards and involuntarily bowed at her insolence.
Turning her attention back to the florist her mother spoke in almost completely unaccented English, "Sorry, what were we saying?"
Without exacerbating what she had just watched the florist continued with their previous discussion.
It always had drove Naomi crazy that her mother did this to her, not the shooting her down part, but the language part.
Her mother wouldn't answer her unless she spoke Xiang, and then if she was pronouncing poorly or if she was slanging her words her mother would berate her.
Finishing up her conversation with the florist the mother turned back towards her daughter and shook her head, "Really… I don't understand your aloofness. I didn't raise you to behave this way."
Naomi quietly nodded.
'Always agree' had been another self-defence mechanism she'd learned as well.
Though like many other things, it never ended up doing her any favours.
Her mother spoke to her as she slowly walked out of the room.
"Get yourself ready, and make sure you sleep tonight, I want you up early so we can run through this rehearsal."
-2-
Yu'icha was piloting the brother's small craft, hot on the tail of their thieves' ship.
"Just had to try and impress her!" He yelled as he turned the ship's controls. "Just had to try and get a female while on the station!"
Tragg grumbled, "It's not my fault!"
Gharack growled, the three brothers were tightly packed into the cockpit of their ship and he never liked being tightly pressed up against anything, let alone his own warring younger brothers.
"Enough… Pay attention to that damn ship… Tragg what's their read out telling us?"
Begrudgingly the youngest of the three returned his attention to his console.
"Well they're gaining energy at a high rate, even though we're not out of the asteroid belt yet…"
"They might be trying to jump away…" Yu'icha said through his gritted teeth.
Though he spoke he was still concentrating on staying close to the ship ahead of them; navigating the smaller pieces of flying space rocks required all his tact and ability.
Gharack nodded, "Then we will follow… the moment they jump we jump too. Understood?"
Yu'icha nodded and Tragg looked up at his older brother with fear in his eyes.
"You can't be serious…"
Gharack snarled, "I am Tragg… these bastards think they can steal from us and get away with it? I'd go to the end of the galaxy if we have to."
Tragg clicked his tusks and exhaled.
"Okay then… Our tracker is locked on them… they jump, we jump."
Gharack made a gruff affirmation.
They followed the thieves' ship for several more tense minutes before it finally shirked forwards and zoomed off as it went FTL.
Tragg quietly cringed, and Yu'icha's eyes widened as he rumbled "Here we go!"
Gharack tensed and held his breath.
A second later their ship followed suit and exploded into FTL speeds.
When they emerged from the jump proximity alerts immediately began to whirr and beep.
Yu'icha's quick reflexes saved them from smashing completely into the side of the thief-ship and instead they only slightly sheered into their quarry.
Tragg clutched his console and Gharack pushed against the sides of the cockpit to keep from falling.
"We're clear!" Yu'icha announced, relieved.
The thieves' ship rattled and chunks of its fuselage tore off in strips.
"Bring us around! I want to board and get our shit!"
Gharack looked intensely at the lurching enemy craft as Yu'icha turned their ship and brought it about.
Tragg pointed at a chunk flying off of the ship larger than the others.
"Wait, isn't that a pod?"
Gharack and Yu'icha both followed their brothers' finger and eventually, against the black backdrop of space, they saw the small 'pod' quickly accelerating away from the main ship.
When they saw the ignition of an engine behind it they knew it was deliberately shot off the ship.
Gharack looked at Yu'icha.
Tragg's console lit up with activity and as he received a message from the ship.
"We've fired off your cargo to the planet below us…"
The voice rumbled with rage but sounded decidedly out of breath.
"We can't fight off both you outside and your pets inside..."
Gharack's eyes widened, the chrysalises were hatching, or had hatched…
"We didn't know you were transporting live serpents! You are all fools!"
The voice continued, "Follow them down there if you must… But we hope that those blasted serpents kill each one of you!"
Yu'icha and Tragg both watched, cringing as the pod continued to shrink, closer and closer to the planet nearby.
"Tragg track that pod! We cannot lose those serpents!"
Tragg nodded and immediately brought his console up while Yu'icha began flying the craft after the falling pod.
Before cutting off communication the voice from the thieves' ship spoke again, "I hope you die down there."
Gharack growled lowly.
"Have you got it Tragg?"
The youngest Yautja nodded, "Locked on…"
"Yu'icha, cloak the ship and begin following it down…"
Lifting himself out of the cockpit Gharack went into the body of their ship to begin suiting himself for their retrieval mission.
"With any luck it'll burn up in the atmosphere, or the xenos will be killed on impact."
Yu'icha called back to Gharack, "We're entering the atmosphere… Hang on!"
The ship began to rumble violently as the interior began to heat up noticeably.
"It looks like it's going to land in water!" Tragg called out.
Gharack felt hope and slight relief, "How close to land? Also what planet is this? Where are we?"
Tragg began flicking through his screen, "This is a known planet…"
Then he called back, "This is the Human home world…"
Gharack felt his chest drop.
"Then you best pray that we aren't going to be spotted and that damn pod lands somewhere unpopulated."
Yu'icha began pulling up to balance their descent.
"Hang on!"
The rumbling began to get louder and louder, and Tragg pointed, "It hit the water!"
Yu'icha quickly responded, "That's not nearly deep enough! Gharack I'm landing the ship."
"Brothers get your shit… We are not leaving this planet until we get each one."
