AN: Shoutout to my wonderful Beta, Vonigner. And thanks to all my readers. Let me know what you think of this chapter if you get a chance!
Anz remembered the way the space shuttle had spun when the debris from the exploded planet flew towards them. The explosion had not been audible — sound doesn't travel in space. But they felt the force of it in their guts when the shuttle became a spinning top, hurtling away from the scene of the destruction, sickening them all in seconds.
It had taken several minutes more to arrest the ship's momentum, the air around them bilious and acidic. Hours to find out what had happened. Days to find a place to hide from Frieza. Weeks to make their hiding place a viable place to live for any length of time. Months before they could treat the events like anything approaching truth. And years to begin the work of gathering up the stragglers: the disobedient who hadn't come when they were called, the weaklings jettisoned for their apparent physical deficiencies, and the hybrids, who nobody had ever really considered members of their species at all, until they needed them to be.
Breath held, Anz opened her eyes underwater. She saw Reet's strong legs, orange skin somehow brilliant even in the murky light.
She had been to Reet's home world only once, many years ago when they had first met. It had helped her to understand her comrade's appearance — the landscape of the planet was a riot of color, the mountains shot through with rich minerals that turned land and river into jewel tones of orange, purple and green. The land was dotted with thick, eye-catching foliage, much of it almost black in color.
Anz had been dazzled, but to the local people it was ordinary. There was a fashion in the cities to build houses as pale and washed of color as you could afford, if you were wealthy enough to have the pigment laboriously removed from the building materials.
The bright-skinned people were just another saturated thing on their vivid world, unremarkable in the haze of color. But on most other planets, including this one, Reet drew eyes everywhere she went.
Anz surfaced, directing a playful splash at Reet, who turned, her long snowy hair plastered to her orange forehead and shoulders. She returned the splash with a smile before submerging herself.
On the river shore, Zaym was already dressing. She seemed to feel Anz's gaze and turned to look back at her. In this light, she looked almost like Anz, her shaggy, coarse black hair loose and wild. You had to get up close to notice — particularly in the dim light— that Zaym's clean, luminous skin was a pale shade of green quite unlike Anz's tawny complexion.
Tugging her boots on, Zaym stood and disappeared into the trees. Probably finding them something to eat. Anz appreciated her initiative on that front. Zaym had been added to their crew only recently, and was some thirty years younger than either Anz or Reet, though the slow aging typical of their kind made it hard to see the age difference unless you knew what to look for.
Anz leaned back, letting the water buoy her up from below. The thick cloud cover above offered a flat, starless sky.
She wondered idly whether it bothered Zaym not to have a tail.
She had snuck a glance at Zaym's back a few times. There was no stub, so she'd never had one by the looks of it. She wondered if Zaym's halfling father had a tail. Her Saiyan mother would have one, naturally. But despite being three-quarters a Saiyan woman, Zaym herself did not. Anz tightened her own tail about her waist. She wanted to ask, but perhaps it wasn't polite to ask hybrids about such things. Questions could be misinterpreted. She would wait until they knew one another better.
She thought then of Reet's children, who did have tails, white as the hair on their little heads. Just like Reet's. They were three-quarters saiyan as well, their full-blooded father added to Reet's half.
Anz's father had sired both of them, in an arrangement that Anz had been against at first. But she saw the sense in it, and so long as there was no ongoing relationship between her father and her commander, she could reconcile herself to it. They were a hybrid people now, as the refrain went. There was no other future for them.
She'd grown to love the strange, peach-skinned, white-tailed little brother and sister the arrangement had produced, though the great difference in age made her feel more like an aunt than an older sister. Once upon a time she'd had two little brothers on Vegetasei, who were only two and three years younger than her. She had been their older sister.
Until they were gone.
Suddenly she lost her footing in the river, water rushing up her nose. Spluttering, she righted herself. Reet was looking over at her, eyes curious. Anz saw her glance away again when she saw she was steady now, all worry gone. Reet began to wade to shore, towards the tree line when Zaym had gone, her muscular back turned to Anz.
Anz was already close to the edge when they encountered the soldiers, and they all knew it.
They'd had word four days ago of an attack on one of their two colonies. One, a modest moon complex, orbited a dead planet. They had taken it by force from the handful of ragged inhabitants they'd encountered there. They had about two hundred of their people there.
The other was a space station — it moved around when it needed to, but sometimes spent years in one place or another if conditions were right. The space station had twice the population of the moon colony, but two thirds of them were younglings.
Almost all of these people were hybrids they'd scooped up from planets where Saiyan children had been sent once upon a time — where they had been too young or too dim to remember that they'd been expected to lay waste to the worlds they landed on. Sometimes they had carried out their instructions, but then found themselves abandoned when the planet or their extraction from it was deprioritised. Then, they had needed to ingratiate themselves to the remaining unwitting locals, to build a life of some description. What other option did they have?
Now their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren were being gathered up, sometimes unwillingly, and added to the colonies. Numbers, that was what mattered. They couldn't be particular about who they accepted.
The space station was what had come under fire. Nobody was sure if the attackers knew who they were threatening — they may have simply been opportunists. The station was heavily armed, and it had turned its guns on the attacking ship and vaporized it in a flash, so now no-one had any way of finding out who they had been or what they had known about the inhabitants of the ship.
Anz was angry about the attack, and angry about the handling of it. All of this was fomenting just beneath the surface of her mind when a handful of the local galactic soldiers made it their business to vex her.
They wanted to know what she was doing here.
She was very obviously repairing a piece of ship equipment. She showed it to them briefly and crouched down again to continue her work. They didn't leave.
"Been a long time since I saw a Saiyan in these parts," one of them remarked.
She assessed them then, out of the corner of her eye. Six of them, in ugly yellow uniforms. Varied species, but all weaker than her.
"I thought they were extinct," another replied. "I suppose they soon will be."
This was probably true, Anz thought, but she'd be damned if she was going to let them stand there and say it. She stood up.
Anz felt Reet place a steadying hand on her forearm. They still needed things from this region, and a fight would make their lives difficult. She made a little noise of dissatisfaction.
"They have a breeding program! I heard they've got lots of little hybrid freaks tucked away, four systems past Lutta." There was laughter from a few from the soldiers.
The space station was currently six systems past Lutta, but that didn't matter much to Anz, who began to vibrate from the effort of restraining herself.
Reet released her grip on Anz's arm, giving her the permission she'd been waiting for.
She was only too glad to act. She sprang at them, tiger-like, powerful.
She had the offender in her grasp in seconds, and it was the work of a moment to dispense with him.
Grasping his jaw, she braced her boots against his chest. It took three hard pulls to take his head off, red and green fluids gushing from the severed neck. The rest of his body dropped like a stone.
With a shriek, Anz pitched the lifeless head at one of the few soldiers still nearby. The rest were sensibly scrambling away at top speed. She hit him with such force he flew sideways into the rock face beyond, slumping to the ground in the distance.
They relocated to the other side of the planet to finish the repairs, away from the forest and towards the desert near the port town. They nestled the ship just inside a cave. They would need to be a little more careful now, but as Anz reminded them, the soldiers in this part of the galaxy were poorly paid, badly trained, and largely incompetent. It wasn't something to lose sleep over.
Unfortunately, they were losing sleep for other reasons.
"We need to get off this rock," Anz said. "We are too far out, we won't know if we are needed, we won't be able to respond fast enough."
"There has been no recall," Reet pointed out. They were on top of the rock face above the cave, and the light was slowly increasing, the second of the planet's two suns having reappeared in the sky after a long absence. Reet appeared to be taking soil samples, gathering up dust with a very small spoon and depositing it into tiny vials. She stowed them in a black pouch with many small compartments.
Anz was generally disinterested in Reet's scientific endeavours, and this was no exception. She assumed these samples were related to future, theoretical attempts to terraform this planet into somewhere they could grow sufficient quantities of food.
Reet clearly thought that the station near Lutta was compromised. Anz had seen from the transmission log that she was doing her best to have her two children moved to the moon colony.
"They haven't responded to your messages," Anz said, arms folded across her chest. Her hair was coiled tightly on top of her head, indicating readiness for battle.
Reet continued with her work.
"Aren't you concerned?" Anz asked.
Reet looked at her sharply. Anz had to resist the urge to draw back.
"Of course I am concerned. But if we don't achieve what we came here for, we will only have to come back."
"If the colonies are decimated, there will be no need to come back, since there will be no need for a planet to live on. We —"
Reet's expression halted her. They lapsed into silence, their tails very tight around their waists.
Anz was relieved when Reet dismissed her, sending her to check on Zaym. She floated down from the rock face and entered the cave.
Zaym was not especially worried about any of the things on Reet or Anz's minds, because she was going through some kind of annual skin-shedding ordeal that came with whatever portion of her physiology was not Saiyan.
Parts of her body had become covered in a gauzy, glittering rash that would eventually slough off and leave new, tougher skin beneath. Anz was amused. She thought the rash was strangely beautiful. When she voiced this, Zaym threw a toolbox at her. Evidently, the constant itching and irritation was not a laughing matter.
It would end in a day or two, but Anz had decided that by way of apology she would come to the ruinously-pricey market town and find a salve for comrade Zaym.
It was there, walking from stall to stall, dressed in her more casual armour and with her tail loose behind her back, that a young man with lavender hair became suddenly much too interested in her.