Be forewarned, this chapter is a bit of a mess. There were some things I needed to get out of the way but I really wasn't feeling it, hope it's not nonsense. I popped a little Jaele/Zihrait fluff treat at the end to make up for it.
I'm trying to advance the plot in a timely manner, but tbh I'm not prepared to jump into the endgame at this point. I haven't yet decided how I'm going to tackle the 'final challenge' because I'm not convinced I could write entertaining action sequences right now, so... we'll see.
There will 100000% be a/multiple sequel(s) which focus more on the rest of the gang for those wondering/interested, I've already been toying with some ideas.
Worry gnawed at Pheist's insides when the armory turned up results equally as fruitless as checking Jaele's cabin and the mess had. There was only one other place she knew of to search for the petite blonde and she wasn't certain of the kind of reception they would receive from Zihrait. Traversing the cruiser was dicey even accompanied by Riot and he was fast losing patience with the assignment of escort she had inflicted upon him. It was obvious he saw no need to concern himself with the other human female's whereabouts, and the fact he'd obliged Pheist even this long was a testament to his attachment to her - she knew that.
It didn't stop her from pushing things, just the same. Would she even be herself if she didn't?
We look for Zihrait, she signed while casting one last vain glance around the armory, hoping against hope she might have missed Jaele somehow amongst the much larger Yautja labouring at their stations. She'd assigned the symbol for 'green' as Zihrait's moniker, knowing of no other way to reference him with the hand gestures, and Riot went along with it.
He was less willing to go along with this latest task, however. Glowering down at her, he snapped his tusks together in irritation. Heal. Train. Prepare. His hands chopped through the air definitively.
Can search and heal at same time. Pivoting on her heel before he could argue the point - a twisting motion her ribs ensured she regretted immediately - she headed back to the door as it opened to permit another. Pheist adjusted her course automatically so as to leave plenty of space for the Hunter to pass her by, so was caught totally off guard when the male stopped in the opening instead of proceeding into the room. Her gaze darted upwards in apprehension at the urgent warning chuff from Riot, still a few paces behind her.
The unique and penetrating stare of the blue eyed Yautja was not one she was familiar with, but at the same time the air of menace clinging to him was unmistakable.
Riot must have made some attempt to intervene, because the massive male's focus flickered past her and his mandibles stretched in an abnormally silent threat. She could hear the turmoil in Riot's answering rumbles - he was still recovering and she was well within the other Hunter's reach.
"What do you want?" she questioned, hoping to buy herself some time to think, but also to ascertain whether he too was capable of understanding her as Vechaath had.
He ignored her entirely. It wasn't until Riot's posturing died away and the crafters resumed working, the prospect of a fight having passed, that he deigned to respond. Mandibles slackening but never quite losing their hostile positioning, his glacial gaze returned to her and he lifted his hands to sign. You will come with me.
She raised a brow. "Will I?" Apparently arrogance was encoded in Yautja DNA. "Why?"
The vicious gleam in his eyes and manner in which his talonless fingers curled as muscles leapt along his forearms were evidence enough she was treading on thin ice. Defy me, soft meat. I will hear you scream as I spill your blood.
As expected, Riot voiced his protest loudly enough for them both, a favour her eardrums weren't likely to thank him for.
"We'll see." There was no way - as much as it would probably bring him delight - she could openly oppose him. She was in no shape to even ponder battling anyone or thing. "So where is it we're going?"
The hounds knew.
Each time he came to feed them, throwing them the carcass of some dead thing or other, they sensed his impending arrival and waited like obedient dogs for him to unlock their enclosure before falling onto the carrion as savages.
Since that first interaction, the male failed to even acknowledge her existence. He certainly never brought anything for her to eat. Time meant nothing. She was parched and dizzy with hunger and knew only the snuffling, snarling, slavering sounds the beasts made as they tussled with one another and tried to chew through the bars of her cage.
Sleeping was impossible. The moment she began to drift off, she'd jerk awake again in terror one of her arms or legs would unknowingly stretch too close to the bars. The times she did momentarily doze, she awoke disoriented and sick with fear at her own folly for doing so.
It was clear she was meant to suffer. There was no other purpose she could fathom for not just killing her on the station. She fully expected the male to open her cage one day and watch in satisfaction as the hounds tore her to pieces. Why else keep her here?
When next the creatures all turned to the door in anticipation she drew her knees up to her chest and hunched behind them, trembling. Even knowing the alien felt no compassion for her, she would undoubtedly beg for her life when the time came.
The door slid back to allow him in and Hwynn's heart leapt into her throat when a much smaller figure stepped out from his shadow. She almost shouted the woman's name like an answered prayer, but the hounds beat her to it, their frenzied growls indicating their own enthusiasm at the sight and smell of another human.
While she now knew he possessed the authority to silence them with a signal, the male permitted the boisterous outburst to go on, whether to further deafen her or to intimate Astridhe, Hwynn wasn't sure. The melanistic male appeared quickly and took up a vigilant stance at Astidhe's side and standing together only a few paces from the blue eyed male, the two of them put into perspective his immense size. Hwynn knew from measurements she'd gathered herself that both the melanistic male and the other that had been captured stood just over seven and a half feet, but the blue eyed male was at least a foot taller, perhaps more.
Somehow, the expression on Astridhe's face as the hounds were silently commanded to quiet down was able to convey both exasperation and wariness over the situation simultaneously. She looked considerably well for someone who'd been drooping unconscious in a Yautja's arms the last Hwynn had seen. The skinsuit she wore seemed of UAF design, but had been patched in more than one area, the darker material not one Hwynn was familiar with. While she'd had access to the Yautja cadavers during her studies, any armor or other tech that had been retrieved along with them had been jealously guarded by the UAF.
"You didn't get the nicest accommodations, did you?" the other woman spoke up finally.
Hwynn couldn't help frowning at the dry humour. Her throat still felt like she'd swallowed a package of razors and the strained voice which left her when she opened her mouth to respond was barely recognizable. "I'm going to die here and that's all you can say?"
Astridhe hitched a shoulder. "I thought you already had, actually. You can't really be surprised after what you did."
"What I did?" Hwynn repeated, taken aback by the callous reply. "Like fuse and plate his tibiofemoral joint back together, you mean? Stitch up his wounds?" The melanistic male had been almost immobile and in poor shape when he'd arrived at the facility. "Attempt to save the other male's vision?" What was it, apart from simply having the misfortune of being on the station when the Yautja attacked, that Astridhe imagined she'd done that justified her death?
"For your breeding program?"
Breeding program? What? "To observe and interact with. To further research their kind. Do you have any idea how valuable that information could be? We know so little about their culture outside hunting, their rituals and belief system - their language, written and spoken. If we could communicate, we might be able to understand why they-"
"'If' we could communicate? Did you miss the talking Yautja?" Astridhe shook her head. "Your droid pal was nice enough to tell me all about the plan to use Riot and Zihrait to create hybrids - I got the impression there was more interest in the value of those than of any research."
Hwynn sat up more, perplexed. "What are you talking about, hybrids?" Had the drugs caused her to hallucinate?
"I seriously doubt you need me to define that term for you, Dr. Hwynn."
"Olinger," Hwynn corrected automatically, receiving a snort for her troubles.
"Around here, you're just soft meat."
Frustration, fear, hunger, and fatigue were making it difficult to wrap her brain around what it was Astridhe was claiming. "I don't know what breeding program you're referring to. I was hired on to the project to record findings, I'm not a medical doctor - I had to follow a procedural tutorial to fix your bodyguard friend and it's frankly a miracle he even still has a leg - and I'm certainly not a reproductive specialist, nor would the scenario you're implying be ethical."
Some of the hounds had begun to pace, growing impatient with waiting for their expected meal, and she was aware of the blue eyed male listening to every word of their exchange in unnatural stillness. He'd brought Astridhe here - why? To condemn her? On the station, Hwynn had gotten the impression he'd very much wished to hurt the other woman.
"Ethical? Do you hear yourself?" When Astridhe made to step towards the enclosure, the hounds eagerly snarled and threw themselves against the bars, causing the melanistic male's talons to flash out in retaliation and catch one across the snout. It yelped and fell back, licking green blood from its scored lips. "What part of capturing and forcibly confining another sentient species for research is ethical?"
"They hunt us for sport!" Not even the raw pain in her throat could disguise Hwynn's disbelief at Astridhe's stance. "My father, my brother, and the entire crew of the freighter their ship was escorting - all dead, all of them! One by one! It took hours, they sent distress calls, they hid - it didn't matter! They were stalked like animals and slaughtered!" Her chest was heaving with the simple effort of shouting, she was so weak. Her entire body trembled in outrage. "And you want to question my ethics for trying to find a way to prevent that from happening again?"
It was clear by the change in her posture that the other woman was digesting what she'd just been told, trying to decide whether she believed it or not. Hwynn didn't care what she believed. She wasn't expecting mercy from the blue eyed male no matter what Astridhe did or didn't believe about her motives or what her purpose on the station had been.
Having witnessed enough of their discourse, he signalled the agitated hounds into silence once again and made some gesture towards Astridhe, to which she gave a slow nod.
"Apparently I'm here to translate," she supplied, none too pleased about it judging by her tone.
The male's hands moved through a series of signs then and Hwynn watched with mounting interest. "A hand code. And you know it?"
"Enough of it. He wants you to fix his voice."
She blinked. "Fix it? But I'm not- I can't possibly. I just said I'm not a medical doctor." The male understood English, and he'd surely heard her.
"I'm just repeating what I'm told." Astridhe's brows twitched as the male signed again. "He said you will fix it, there is no alternative."
"I can't! I don't even know what was done to him, or whether it's repairable," Hwynn insisted.
Approaching the outer enclosure, the male's mandibles flared. He did nothing more, and yet the venomous glint of his pale eyes was threat enough.
"'Can't' isn't a word Yautja abide too well," Astridhe's voice floated across the chasm Hwynn felt only too keenly was opening up beneath her feet. This was the reason her life had been spared previously. This was what he wanted with her.
And she had no idea how she was going to accomplish it.
Running her thumb over the worn groove of the figurine, Jaele tried to recall when it'd disappeared from the cavern. The simple feminine silhouette had been one of her earliest attempts at sculpting the alien stone, a way to pass the time on the twin sunned planet after Zihrait had gone. She hadn't known the first time that he would return. He'd spent days and days trying to teach her to defend herself, to evade his attacks, to no avail.
She looked across to where he sat on the pelt covered bed, deftly sharpening a curved blade. He slid an oiled cube designed to refine the edge down the serpentine length of the weapon, the repetitive motion smooth and competent. Whether by variances in the sound or feel of the sharpening tool rasping against the metal, he knew which areas required more pressure and which less.
She waited for him to pause to test the blade with his thumb before approaching, ensuring he would hear her, and his head lifted accordingly from the task to track her movements. The cloudy film which dulled his eyes didn't look to have changed at all despite Pheist's insistence treatment attempts had been made to correct the vision loss. A series of rolling clicks erupted from his throat - he was trying to figure out what she was doing. Reaching for his free hand, she pushed the figurine into his palm and watched as his fingers closed around it, determining by touch what it was. The clicks petered off into a small rumble of recognition.
She wanted to ask him why he'd taken it. He'd always been angered to find she'd been painting or carving rather than training, as evidenced by her lack of discernible improvement despite his continued efforts. Taking his hand in her much smaller ones, she eased his fingers apart again - hoping he would continue to indulge her - and removed the trinket, tucking it inside her robe for the moment. She then proceeded to manipulate his hand, raising it slightly and extending his last two fingers, awkwardly forming the gesture for 'why'.
The way he angled his head and flexed his talons in her grip suggested he didn't understand what it was she was asking of him and when she attempted to repeat the hand sign, he pulled free and stood up, forcing her to take a step back. Worried she was trying his patience, Jaele retreated more. She should have let him be, he'd been absorbed in what he'd been doing.
Others betray you, he signed instead of returning to sharpening the blade, surprising her. You don't run. Don't hide. Face death with strength.
She questioned her understanding of that last gesture since Yautja attributed multiple terms or meanings to each, but the message as a whole made her heart swell just the same. He seemed to have perceived what it was she'd truly needed to know, what she'd been yearning to know since that day even if that hadn't been what she'd been trying to inquire about.
Flipping the blade into a backhanded grip so that it posed no danger to her, he crossed the room to the rack which housed his armor and weapons and replaced it with care. The display of mounted trophies stretching before him was a testament to his prowess and it was there, amongst his prized kills and equipment, that she'd spotted the figurine.
It occurred to her that she'd had her answer right then.