Featherkisser
2
Talner and Kel's jobs down here were all about shifts. Everything came and went, and everything was determined by who was next on the chopping block, so-to-speak.
Schedules for most people were frail things, and they were easy to screw up. The nights here took something already made of glass and threatened it with stone. Even without Kuhaga's badgering, neither of them had any desire to usurp their own responsibilities.
Besides, there were much worse things lurking in the dark beside all these rock hobbles and cliff faces.
"Kuhaga never told us a name for them."
Talner took his eyes out from his binoculars and looked over oddly at the T'vaoan. Her skull-like face was set, like concrete, and if he hadn't caught her teeth surely flexing in the corner of his vision, he wouldn't have had any clue that she had spoken.
"I reckon he didn't." Talner shrugged, shifting on his belly so he could crane over and examine the side of her avian snout. "But then, nothing else in this moss-hole has a name either. Tg-66? The Alliance couldn't even bother with something better than a code."
"They did not land here." Kel's eye on his side was the open one, and normally it was narrowed, and pushed straight ahead to gaze into her Needlerifle's scope. But after she stated this, Talner found himself looking directly into it for a heart-stopping second. His blood chilled.
"…I heard they sent a few drones, but…" –His small-talk might or might not have worked. Right now he was fumbling, and he only ever fumbled when he was caught.
Caught as he might have been, he soon remembered that there was a certain degree of permission here.
He had passed theoretical gates, and there were things that she gave him leniency with that she did not give anyone else in the company.
Just some things, I'd say, he thought in a clarifying lapse.
"My pack is too tight."
"Wha'…?" Talner blinked rapidly, like someone had thrown a pinch of salt in his face. "What did ya' say?"
"My pack." Kel still had her one eye craned to him. She moved her avian body in a slight mimicry of motion, most likely in admiration to a caterpillar's angle. She wriggled her back, and the padded cuirass securing her blackly colored flesh from him shifted across her outline. "It's too tight."
For a second, Talner glanced between her back, and her yellow eye dumbly. Then, he laughed, put down the binoculars, and sat himself up off his elbows.
"It's cuzz' you're looping the belt straps." He told her quickly, feeling a chilled spike shoot down his forehead at the closeness of his own calling. He leaned over her, and didn't hesitate to wrap his arms underneath her slender torso. Kel kept her gaze locked in her rifle's scope, though, he did notice her occasionally peeking back at him past the crest of her feathered mane. "Don't loop the belt straps, and the mag-locks will keep on ya' enough. You're too skinny for all that extra tetherin'-"
Talner paused, dared himself, and added a sweetly toned- '-honey' –at the end of his explanatory jest.
Kel made a tiny crooning noise in response but didn't do much else. She just kept passively peering at him. Her eye was an amber flicker over the rim of a star of black. What with all the feathers, the rear of her bird-like scalp, and her back neck bloomed like a bouquet of dusty midnight flowers.
Her feathers were pillowy and soft to the touch. They were strange things to him, but things altogether that never escaped his notice. He had never possessed any good company to discuss it with, and perhaps he did find his own actions distasteful in that they were indirect.
God, Talner tried to focus on the interior of his own skull, rolling his eyes back as he struggled with the straps pinned under her chest. Luckily, they were placed more between the rib's joint and the abdomen. If it had been a little higher, his nerves might have checked him to stillness. That didn't make it not a struggle for him, though.
Keep coverin' it with small talk.
"See anything out there?" He saw her looking at him past her mane still, and nodded for the gun in her hands. The Kig-yar, for her part, seemed a little flustered at his perception, like she was annoyed with herself that he had seen her peaking.
What she did not tell him was the reason that she was looking at him for. It wasn't simply the contact, but it was from picking up his scent.
Kig-yar possessed doubly the senses of humans. One of her kind could simply pick out the smells and smaller sights in an environment much quicker.
Henceforth, a smell powerful to the human nose was twenty times as powerful to hers. Talner smelt of flesh-salt, plastics from his attire and was drenched in a tinge of cologne-stench. Her heart was literally dancing loops in her throat.
Her feathery mane bristled, and he saw her shake her head, offering the quiet night air a tiny craw beneath her breath as she regained composure.
"Negative." She reported briskly, turning the rifle's bearing to the west, aiming the slender barrel over the top crags of the boulders ringing the plateau of their sniper nest. "Ginger, check, Alpha, check, Spine, check. All is dark here."
He loosened the straps on her combat harness, and immediately swept away from the heat-filled presence of her form, rolling off her and back onto the dirt.
"All fixed, love." He snickered.
God, he mentally gawked, suddenly wishing he could've shoved his whole fist into his mouth.
The T'vaoan didn't say thank you. She merely cooed and twitched the feathers running down her back. She wasn't looking at him, and so, he grunted, flattening his chest to the earth, and dutifully made to retrieve his binoculars.
"What of you?" She suddenly asked him.
"What about me?" He grinned.
"Did you see anything?" She nodded at the binoculars, but was now looking right at him. She looked like an eagle. An upright, alerted, space-eagle. Her long snout was flattened from the perspective he was looking at it from. Black, with white highlights, dusty coating and the fashion of bone. The markings on her face looked like warpaint.
I'm seeing a lot now, forget before-
"Nothin'." He winked.
Kel's head arched back a little, and a tiny- 'Mmraw…~' –mediated in the back of her throat. She stuck the scope back over her eye and jabbed the rifle over the boulders, eagerly looking for something to shoot.
-Or perhaps, she eagerly sought something else to look at besides him.
"Do you have any more of the bars?" She asked him.
"Fresh out." He grunted, pressing the binoculars over his brow. He checked the flickering feed they gave him, taking them up and down, left and right over the edge of the very blackness of the trench below.
So far, there was nothing.
He heard Kel sigh in disappointment. Whether it was because of the chocolate running out, the lack of targets, or her own impatience with him, he didn't know.
"Tell me of the burn tanks." Kel shifted on her belly. "Why do they keep breaking?"
"…They're, uhm-" He cleared his throat. "-they're being overloaded. Overloaded to high hell. Kuhaga won't replace the cores, and that's why ole' Yamva's running a cross country circuit between Ginger and Spine. He keeps havin' to fix the damn things because too much ore is coming through at once."
"What is that?"
"What's what?"
"A- 'Cross Country Circuit?' –" She pronounced slowly.
"…Aw, old Earth expression."
"Tell me of it." She croaked.
Talner lowered the binocs' and coughed.
God damn it, what is wrong with her tonight?
He looked up at the top of the trench. He could no longer discern the sky from the cliff faces. Everything up there was just black. Night had eaten everything.
The digsite ahead and below them sprawled in a consistent blue light from the hundreds of staked worklamps studded and sprinkled throughout the causeways and ledges. The digsite was a buffer, and the dusk evening swelled around it, like it hoped to stamp out its beacon of illumination.
Too dark. Too cold.
He looked over at Kel and found her staring at him in the evening shade. She looked like a creature of the night, vaguely draconic, lithe and not disturbed by any sort of thing that could've happened. Her eyes were felinoid in the darkness. Two disks of glowing bronze, centered with daggers of black. She had snake eyes.
"What is it?" He blinked. "What?"
"I assumed you were going to be speaking." She returned his blinking gesture, but hers was slow, and fossilized. Her lids seemed heavy, and her mood quaint.
Sometimes, he forgot just how alien she really was. How many social cues had they passed each other and missed because of the different backgrounds?
Christ almighty, there was probably a pile.
"-Why're you always asking so many questions anyhow?" Talner grinned, doting on his binocs', feeling her return to the Needlerifle's scope. His binoculars looked blue in the worklamp haze of the area. Everything was blue. Blue cast. Blue, blue, blue… blue.
Blue and yellow. Blue outside, yellow inside the mineral water caverns.
Fancy that shit, right?
"Do they offend you?" The Kig-yar quietly crooned by his flank. She sounded like she was pouting.
"What's botherin' you tonight, Kel?" He asked, staring through the blue haze at the flank of her alien body. "You're actin' funny."
"I asked first."
"No, they don't offend me. But you're actin' funky." Talner put down the binocs' and grinned. "What is it that you always say? C'mon, Kel, confide in me."
Kel snorted and gave off a tiny noise of fascination. Out of all the things she'd expected from Talner, him reversing words on her wasn't one of them.
The T'vaoan took a long moment to look at him in the darkness of the digsite's lamp-hazed night. She scrutinized him with her amber, felinoid eyes and felt her feathers rustle. This earned a muttering croon on her own end, and she bashfully stuck her face back into the scope of her rifle.
She realized- with a sour taste in her mouth –that his concern was flattering to her.
"Target mark." Kel croaked, shoving the rifle's spine so eagerly into her shoulder that it started to hurt. "Firing."
"-Waitasec'- just what are we doin' now-?"
Crack~! –the night flashed in a resounding flower of pinkish color. It was just for a second, permeated and marked by the glassy snap of synthetic crystal.
No sooner had Talner's features been painted magenta by the burst of hue did he snap the binoculars to his face. He didn't catch the impact, but he did catch the results.
The shot had traveled horizontally over the mile-wide gap of the trench. The Needler shard's victim was a black, amorphous and vaguely arachnid sprawl that had been clinging to the cliffside wall far below the various walkways and bridges they used to scale the area.
It fell soundlessly back into the shadows from whence it had been born. Talner was quick with his own scope, and probably due to that talent was he able to trace the thing's flight for a split second.
He could barely make out the limp extensions of bladed limbs wiggling from a center dais of plated chitin. The creature's corpse trailed sickly colored ichor as a globular trail in its wake. This spilled life tumbled into the darkness after it, chasing its warm host with eerie vigor.
In a split second, it was all was over. Beside him, Talner heard Kel croon. This time, it was a vocal demonstration of audible relief, being akin to the sound someone would make after putting down a strenuous load they had been carrying for some distance.
He smirked- whether at the irony or amusement, he didn't know –and put down the binocs' to grin at his avian friend.
Kel's eyes looked as warm as they were colored, and a little smile was winding up her beak-like snout.
"You needed that." Talner chuckled.
"Hell yes~." She croaked under her breath. The Kig-yar wore an expression of resplendence, lowered her rifle and checked the uplink on her wrist, scowling suddenly at the current cycle listed.
"'Bout high time anyhow." Talner reached over and straightened some of her feathers with a few zealous pinches and pulls. "Shift change, darling."
"Yes." Kel huffed from the pleasurable shivers she received from his touch, and made to lift herself off her own belly. The war-padding over her shoulder glinted in the dark, catching blue from the lamp-spires nearby their little plateau. "It was an uneventful sortie."
"You can say that again." Talner stuffed the binocs' on his belt. "But, hey, more activity then there's been."
"Kuhaga does not listen to me." Kel craned an arm over her flank, and waited for the mag-locks on her rifle to adhere to the rear of her cuirass with an audible click~! –of noise. "How do you say it?"
"I'll grill him." Talner said, smirking when Kel bobbed her chin, remembering the word that had been tickling the tip of her thin tongue. "See ya' tomorrow."
Kel hesitated as the two of them stood in the sniper nest. He saw her claw twitch by her hip, and her feathers become disheveled. The shorter alien looked away from him and huffed.
Instinctually, Talner reached around her arm to fix her mane, but Kel separated herself with an impatient croon and trotted towards the natural ramp to their south.
"Night." –She sharply chipped, and her darkly colored form was swallowed by dusk's embrace.
{👾}
Yamva suddenly realized that he was gripped by a need to smash Kuhaga in the face with one of his wrenches.
There were a myriad of reasons for why he felt that way, but two stood out in definite obviousness. Firstly, Kuhaga was still being stubborn. He was so stubborn that the things he was saying were mechanically nonsensible. The inner engineer of Yamva's soul was shrieking.
Secondly, Kuhaga normally possessed an ugly face, but right now, as he was scowling at his subordinate, the ringleader was gripped by a particular expression that simply rendered his physique teeth-grating.
Yamva ground his fangs, and felt the tan-colored flesh lining his chops tug in a slight twitch.
Maybe if I flexed my fingers, one of the Kig-yar's amber eyes darted down to his flank, where a certain hunchbacked calamity was currently teetering in uncomfortable silence by his heels. The gas-sucker would get the message and hand me one of the bolt-fixers. A nice big one. An eight-eighteen. Heavy wrenches, those ones. Kuhaga's skull would pop open like a ripe fruit.
"You are completely right," Yamva grinned like a crocodile, for his other eye reinserted the ever-present knowledge that he was alone here, with but a few fetid sweeps. Kuhaga had a sidearm, but at least it wasn't in his hand.
Kuhaga's two guards, however, both had projectile carbines in their clasps. The guns were dull, black rectangles in the din of Spine Cavern, but their ammunition readouts glowered at him like a pair of sickly, neon-green stars in the dark.
"-the burn-tanks are functioning, and plasma will begin to flow again." Yamva even concluded his statement with a slight bow. It made his spine ache and his guts swirl.
Ugly, simian, unkempt son of a bitch.
"If I may speak out of term once more; if we do not replace the tanks' filtration vents, I may not be able to get them working the next time they overheat." He knew that Kuhaga had made to interject, and so Yamva spoke rapidly, as best he could with human-speak. Though, by now the Kig-yar engineer had become so used to alien tongues that his own had become more a far-flung, exotic backwash in the very rear of his throat.
By the gods, he couldn't even remember the last time he'd used his home dialect with even one of his own kind.
All the other Kig-yar here were homeworlders and asteroid-goers. He was the only one from his own rock, and that had made barriers in their tongues evident.
It was funny, because Yamva hated speaking English. It made his mouth feel like the interior of a flushing latrine bowl. The language was dirty, lacking in grace, and it twisted his fangs in every direction they were never meant to go.
Translators would have been nice.
"You won't have to worry about that." Kuhaga said.
Yamva released himself from his bow, and glared at Kuhaga over the short distance dividing them. The darkly skinned, bald giant of a human man shook his head at the concerns with disinterest, making Yamva's heart sink.
"The stowage is almost full. Once we have a complete load, we're kicking off planetside and heading west right after." Kuhaga had a gravelly voice, making it sound as if his throat was populated not by flesh and chords, but by jagged rocks. "There are ports, Dry Dock and Refuse being the name two. Confederates aren't going to argue against a fresh supply."
Yamva opened his beak and left it hanging. He glared once at Taptap beside him just for the hell of it, and contemplated his next words carefully.
"…Aren't our contracts finite to the end of this job?"
"You got that right." Kuhaga frowned. The two guards at his flanks looked so bored, that Yamva was afraid one of them would shoot his Grunt just to liven the conversation up.
For how much hate-talk the engineer gave the little gas-sucking shit, he certainly had a long neck to put out for him.
Thusly, in a righteous display of immaculate insanity, Yamva took a step forward and actually placed a leg in front of Taptap to divide the two parties. Yamva realized his own reactive prominence and coughed.
It wasn't a human cough either. It was something like a reptilian wheeze. He'd just done that to relieve the urge to curse out loud.
Crack open his head with one of the wrenches! Even if the underlings pepper you to pieces with DMR rounds, it would have all been worth it!
Kuhaga's bald scalp gleamed like a fresh target in the Spine cave's din. Yamva licked his teeth.
"Is there a problem?" Kuhaga asked.
"There're over thirty-six contracts, most of them from the Eayn prefecture's range and Dust Rim. You're going to leave them all with the Confederates?" Yamva spoke. "Dry Dock and Refuse are havens, yes, but they're holes, Kuhaga. Where are you going to get new blood when all the old blood hasn't forgiven you for dumping them off in the galaxy's proverbial arm-pit?"
"That isn't for you to worry about." Kuhaga snorted. "Besides, we could always fly just a few parsecs north and end up in Winsway, not an arm-pit, but an asshole."
Wrench. Wrench!
Yamva bowed again.
"As long as the credits flow." He said.
"However it'll turn out once the stowage is done, we'll see." Kuhaga let some of the tension bleed from himself. The large human folded his arms behind his back and stared. "You aren't the only veteran in these ranks, Yamva, and we might need you after this."
When Yamva said nothing, Kuhaga ascertained for the unspoken concern.
"Under pay, of course." He growled.
Sensing a rift, Kuhaga spat on the floor and briskly spun around on a heel. He and his entourage were gone as quickly as they had appeared, and Yamva watched their armored backs with a simmering need for violence.
"But, Yamva, you say that burn tanks not-"
Taptap's complaint was silenced beneath a pained yelp. Yamva had lifted a foot and stamped on the Unggoy's little hoof so hard that the joints cracked.
"Not within earshot." The Kig-yar chattered, sweeping an arm- making Taptap flinch away –and gesturing for him to follow. "Come on."
"If burn tanks break, plasma cause holdup." Taptap made sure to keep his voice down, watching with beady red eyes as Kuhaga's troupe vanished around the tunnel's corner. "If there holdup, all here longer."
"I know." Yamva dragged a claw down his snout. Little idiot. "-That only increases the risk. Tg-66 is in unfriendly space, and the longer we persist here, the more of a chance we'll be discovered."
Yamva looked down at Taptap as they walked.
"I know you don't understand half the weight of what we're currently stuck in, but I can tell you that anything passing for authority this far from Alliance space, will have its own brand of personal justice."
"…Uhm…" The Unggoy paused as he waddled.
Too fast again.
"Just stay close and keep some spare tanks available for yourself." Yamva said. "Do you still have the welder-pistols on you?"
"What those?"
Yamva rolled a jaw.
"The... what did you call them? The shiny burning guns?"
Taptap went very quiet, but then caused Yamva to grit his fangs with a shrill outburst.
"Yeah! Shiny burning guns! We got two." Taptap reported pridefully, even holding up the aforementioned number of claw-like digits for emphasis. Unfortunately, the fingers participating numbered four. "We need fix something?"
"In a sense." Yamva chortled like a chattering crow. "Bring those with the toolbox in a few cycles, when day breaks. They'll get suspicious if they see me carrying them."
"What that word mean?"
"What word?"
"Sussy-pickious."
Yamva cursed in his native language, laughing. Sometimes, the Unggoy's stupidity was like a short-fuze bomb. Taptap would flap his gums, and Yamva's nerves would just make him-
Clack~!
"-Aye~! Read my teeth; watch where you travel, or I swear I shall-" Yamva's threats were sucked right out of his beak when he saw who he had bumped into.
"I'd be wiser to whom I issue threats." Kel-Yn-Gor's voice was like a scythe through wheat. Yamva's effort must have been tired as such for her to so easily smite it.
The Kig-yar engineer stepped back from where he'd collided with her and crossly glared over his own beak.
Kel, for her own part, hadn't moved a muscle. Running into her had been like walking head-on into a stone wall.
Initially stupefied by the suddenness of it, Taptap regained his senses, earning an unconcerned glance from Kel as he gathered by Yamva's foot and growled. The noise sounded like that of an angry little dog. It made Kel smile, and Yamva cringe.
"Engineer." The T'vaoan angled her jaw in a disgruntled greeting, even going so far as to dust off her breastplate. "Off-duty?"
"Kel-Yn-Gor, what a pleasure. Yes, I am." Yamva cocked his bird-like head, scrutinizing, more for his own personal inhibitions than for any sense of real threat-analytics. To him, Kel was a loose, but controllable predator. She only struck when provoked. "Yourself?"
"Yes."
"An uneventful cycle?"
"No."
"No?"
"No." Kel smirked a little bit. Yamva found the expression alien to her normally grim muzzle. "One kill tonight. After that, all was well and dark."
"What a normalcy…" Yamva actually produced a slight whistle as Kel started to walk around him. His words died in his throat, and their corpses whisked past his fangs.
Kel kept a distance as she nonchalantly murdered the exchange, though she was vainly- as always –maintaining a degree of dismissive annoyance when she noticed Yamva staring at her hips. He always stared at her hips.
"Never like her anyway…" Taptap grumbled by his foot. Yamva snorted and shoved roughly past the Grunt's tank-hump, following after the sniper. Taptap chattered excitedly and fell flat on his face in a slight puff of dust. Nearby, a pair of passing human sentries chuckled from a tunnel over.
"Kel-Yn-Gor, there's something of late that I think would intrigue you." Yamva stated openly, and honestly, following on her heels closely, enough for the T'vaoan's feathers to bristle uncomfortably. "-I've heard some things."
"Get away from me, Yamva." Kel's skull-like chops blared in a disparate grimace. She had said his name like it was a plague!
That bitch.
"I'm not presuming to hold a conversation with you." Yamva smiled pleasantly, or, as pleasantly as his serrated dagger-teeth would allow him. He looked like a crocodile again, but with all the slipperiness of a snake. "This plasma could be the death of us all, you know."
"Whatever it is you have scraped off the floors here does not interest me." Kel rolled her felinoid eyes. Her claw twitched as she considered how long it would take her to leap away from him and arm herself with her Needlerifle if the situation warranted it.
"Our first meeting went off on a tangent, Kel-Yn-Gor."
-Whenever he spoke her name, it made her skin crawl. Kel was graced with an overpowering urge to shoot and kill him.
"I talked with Kuhaga." Yamva stated quickly. "Do you know where he intends to end the contracts? Do you?"
"Why would I believe anything that slipped from your teeth?" Kel hissed.
"Because I want to warn you."
Kel hunched menacingly, spun around and kept her teeth bare, snarling at the engineer, and enacting a quaint few steps back on his part.
"Do you think I am stupid?" Kel asked him, pointing at the tunnels surrounding them. "Do you think I don't know what Kuhaga is doing?"
"It is not like that." Yamva held his claws up for peace. Behind him, Taptap was spitting soil from the rinds on his mask and was wiggling to his cloven feet. The ruckus was palpable and wholly annoying. "Kuhaga fancies Confederates. Human Confederates. That far outside of Alliance or Neo space is too fiery for my taste. I'm proposing you."
"You're what?" Kel was reaching around for her gun.
"-For a truce!" Yamva stepped forwards, but quickly stilled himself. His possessive attitude made her blood run cold, and now, the urge to defend herself was overwhelming.
But, then again, Yamva's mere presence was enough to elicit that response from anyone, especially a member of his own race that possessed the opposite gender.
"My assistant," Yamva gestured to the struggling Unggoy behind him. Taptap was rolling around like a beetle flipped onto its back.
"Yamva~!" Taptap cried weakly, teetering on his own tank. "-Help~!"
"-….My… assistant," Yamva spat quietly. "has a way for us to get out of this with all the right pieces, so to speak."
Kel lowered her claw from her own shoulder and crooned quietly. Though she did not drop the defensive pact between her heels, she did allow her guard to somewhat wither.
"If I told Kuhaga about your plans for mutiny," She elaborated. "he would be more inclined to believe me over you. Word against word, Yamva, and I will succeed where you cannot."
"I know." The engineer sneered. "That's why you're the first Kig-yar I must convince. Blood to blood."
"I am the first you must convince because you are a freak." Kel shook her head. "I want no part of whatever it is you're planning."
"Even if it guarantees survival?"
"Survival? With only that Balaho-trudger and you as company?" Kel laughed, backing away down the tunnel. "Especially if it guarantees that."
"You're making a mistake." Yamva croaked.
"We all do at some point." The T'vaoan rounded a corner and vanished.
"-Yamva-!" Taptap whined behind him, his clawed feet kicking in the air. He couldn't get up. "-Yamva~!"
Yamva stared at the corner of the tunnel, then turned around and roared: "-I know~!"
{👾}
Tg-66 had crabs. Really big, ugly crabs, that crawled out from the blackness of the trench below the digsite.
Ever since Kuhaga had led them all here to start harvesting the plasma had the little buggers started cropping up. They were man-sized beasties. Arachnid in construction, possessed of a pair of razor-sharp claws and bulky legs. The Cliff Crabs were numerous, tough, and they had a taste for fresh flesh.
One of the contractors had already met his end at their claws. Talner remembered it vividly. The body, sliced to ribbons, gnawed on by tens of serrated little mouth-pieces. He'd originally felt bad for the crabs when he had first started shooting them.
After that, killing them had felt endearing, like he was doing this backwater rock a favor.
The problem was, that they just didn't stop coming.
That was where he and Kel came in.
Nightly posts were a thing here, and basically, his job revolved around pest control these days. Kel always had her trusty Needlerifle, and Talner bridged up with his decommissioned sniper carbine.
The heavy-duty gun was a prelude to what he would ultimately forge his career into, and was a symbol of the man he had once been. Everyday he held it and operated it, it in return fed his soul bittersweet feelings of near euphoric memory.
During his years in the corps it had served him well. But now, his girl was an antique. Ever since he had been discharged from the ranks, had the model kept changing and evolving.
The new rifles orbiting around in the UNSC made his look like a children's toy. But to Talner, that was unimportant. What mattered was getting the job done.
Bang~! –the sniper rifle kicked and the brass howled in his ears. The coppery shell bounced off his shoulder, and through the scope, he could see the fat, ugly Land Crab that had been crawling up the trench face split in half, right down the middle.
The armor-piercing bullets rendered the creatures' tough carapaces as effective as napkin paper. Shooting them was like shooting water balloons. The rounds punched and split everything open like a ripe melon. He was surprised they hadn't given up, what with several of their adventurous friends raining back down to the pits below in mushy pieces.
Talner slid a fresh magazine into the gun's fat underbelly and yanked the bolt back. He'd already killed eight of the things, and it hadn't even been an hour.
Perhaps he was just lucky, or Kel was very unlucky. Either way, she would be crooning with interest tomorrow when he reported his kills.
That's a darn shame, he smiled sadly, sweeping the cliff face with his scope. What it's all come to.
Back in the corps, his watches wouldn't be so static and permanent, and they certainly wouldn't have been over something so fickle such as Land Crabs on Tg-66.
His career in the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers had nailed in a certain degree of hardiness into his routine. The scope had always fed him sigils of death and torment and brutality. Seeing the crabs split open like that was no different than watching a Brute's face implode or a Grunt's belly cave-in.
How many had that allotted to? He didn't know. Talner wasn't bothered by the killing, and he knew that was because of the species difference.
As he adjusted the weapon's sight, he realized that the thing that was bothering him was Kel.
Kel-Yn-Gor, the other sharpshooter on duty for Kuhaga's contractors.
She was a confusing tidbit of energy in his brain.
Ever since he had been discharged, this is where he had ended up. Mercenary work was his calling, in a sense, though he would've described it that way purely to avoid outright stating that he didn't know how to live without a gun in his hands anymore.
He was about to have his thirtieth birthday soon, and that realization nagged him as much as Kel's visage did. The T'vaoan was his only conversation out here, and to think for a moment that he risked that with his damned PTSD made him angry.
I wonder if that's what's giving her hell.
He zoomed the scope westward and pulled the trigger.
Bang~!
-A Land Crab bigger than his torso popped like a sack full of jelly. The limbs and chunks rolled and bounced back into the blackness of the trench.
The gun jammed, and he yanked the casing free with a quick tug of the bolt.
I should've brought more chocolate.
Kel loved that stuff. Something about her had always revolved around it. As in, his knowledge on her disturbed him.
He knew that Kel was a chocolate fiend. He knew that she was a lifetime merc', and that her combat experience had come from being a gunrunner out in the Eayn asteroid fields for almost eight years before she had met him.
He knew that she enjoyed having her feathers touched. He knew that she hated cold weather. He knew that Kel was enraptured in a kind of intrigue that any member of her species would recognize with infatuated interest.
Talner coughed and swept the scope east.
Son of a bitch.
-Honestly, who was here to judge that about him? Who was here to preach the gospel, portray sin or question integrity?
It made perfect sense. Maybe he'd shot so many aliens that now their exposed anatomy had worn off on him.
Or maybe he was going crazy.
Damned PTSD.
The moment that man, that bloody doctor, had told him of that on the excursion to Harvest… Talner had been angry with himself since then. He couldn't tell anyone why. But when the doctor had announced that diagnosis, it had simply enraged him.
So, like a druggy hooked on the material, he had followed the fuse-line.
He was still out here, in space, shooting things. That doctor would've howled at the audacity.
Talner spit into the dust and pulled the trigger.
Bang~!
-Ten in one night. Go me.
The shell danced past his cheek. He tried to blot out his mental chaos and focus on Kel again. He found himself wishing she was next to him, as she always was whenever he showed up early for the shift change. The dirt up on the plateau always felt… lonely to him.
Fuckin' hell.
Bang~!
Bang~!
-He ejected the magazine and switched it.
I'll have to bring more chocolate tomorrow, he looked up at the sky for a second. It was too black to discern it from the cliffs, but he knew it was there. Maybe I can bribe an answer out of her.
{👾}
The cot wasn't much relief from an otherwise fang-chatteringly cold atmosphere. Still, it was better than the soil. Spine Cavern didn't offer much hospitality in any sense, but the secluded cell was at least something.
Truth be told, the caverns wound so deeply into the earth of Tg-66 that the contractors hadn't explored Spine's deepest extensions yet. There were still at least twenty documented miles of tunnels and passages that hadn't been swept, and armed details were kept at every known mouth to these 'Unknown Sectors' –for that very reason.
The Land Crabs were the biggest concern, but there was no telling what else was present in these tunnels. Some of the other men were talking about black shapes, deep in the crevices of Spine that were so fast, that they couldn't be tracked by the naked eye.
Kel thought it was all bullshit.
It was nothing more than extraneous tales told by exhausted night-duty patrols. There were only around forty people in the digsite, a mix between Kig-yar and human. Everyone here was running from something. That much paranoia in one place would undoubtedly lead to some… interesting episodes of the night-creepies.
Kel, for her part, didn't fear the dark. She had always been forced to live in it for so long, that she supposed it was sort of a haven for her.
The cot may have been uncomfortable as all hell but its place in the shadows was perfect for her tastes. Its springs squeaked as the T'vaoan curled up her lithe form and nested in its sheets, much like how a bird would.
Fucking space chicken.
Kel furrowed her eye-ridges and crooned in annoyance. Yamva's badgering had set her off on a bit of a tangent.
So, he was planning a mutiny.
Who the hell out here wasn't?
Kuhaga was a self-serving son of a bitch who only had interests placed in his own lap with the intent to suck the labor freely out of his fellows.
So far, every ex-UNSC goon Kel had encountered had proven to be nothing but yet another leech and a condescending thug. It was as if they had been trained to and sought to use that system to further expunge things for their own gain.
Talk about manufactured disenfranchisement.
…Except Talner, of course.
The T'vaoan tried to close her eyes, but found one of them staying open at the ex-ODST's mentioning.
He was such a… a…
-What was the word again? It was human. English. Something with a…
Doofus.
Kel produced a tiny clucking under her breath and stewed in the cot's sheets.
Yes. What a doofus.
The body-sleeve over her form felt tight. Her feathers broached and she squirmed underneath the synthetic wrapping. A click of her tongue extenuated her own annoyance. Things always got like this whenever he popped into her head.
Kel was a loner by heart and had never sought to undo that. Being paid to fend off frigate-thieves in the asteroid belts around T'vao had solidified that reclusive nature into her, especially after she had killed her first man.
She had been a chick back then.
At least, practically.
But, chick or not, she needed to eat, and shooting people in the head had proven an easy way to make credits. Her kind were naturally predisposed to being marksmen, but Kel had always shown great promise.
Her talent for long-ranged killing was precise enough to force several employers into bidding wars, and throughout her anti-piracy years on T'vao, she had found herself switching sides frequently to follow the paychecks.
Things were always interesting when you were raiding the same frigate you had been paid to escort two weeks prior.
There was enough killing in Eayn to ensure an endless supply of opportunities.
So she wondered why after all that time, she was feeling sentimental now. She'd had plenty of opportunities to stew in her own shit and undo the past, but now, that she was out here, in the middle of Tg-66, now she wanted the proverbial reset button.
To what end did that make sense?
Talner.
Kel huffed, her crimson throat warbling. She sat up in the cot and looked around her cell. The natural walls glistened with cave-dew, and the little lamp-pack placed by the archway portal to the hall outside glimmered blue in the dusk air.
Footsteps outside earned a natural reaction from her. The Kig-yar's claw brushed tenderly over the spine of her Needlerifle, which was placed presumptuously underneath the cot's flank.
Someone cleared their throat, and the footsteps became hollow, and eventually vanished. Kel chattered and curled back up in the sheets to pout. It had just been one of the sentries. There were always five or six on duty inside Spine every night. She was paranoid, she remembered.
Talner.
Kel licked her fangs and slapped her chops. She suddenly had a craving for chocolate again. That stuff was the highlight of her times with him. She loved chocolate.
Feeling her feathers tickle her, the Kig-yar arched an arm back and jammed her claws into them to stifle the irritation. Her hips ached and her thighs felt warm. She licked her whole muzzle this time, gave off a tiny- 'Crawwwwt~….' –and rubbed the dagger of her palm roughly in between her legs.
A sharp tingle caused her belly to wiggle and her toes to spread under the sheets. She bit back a hiss and blinked her eyes tightly.
You have to be kidding me.
The cot felt ten times more uncomfortable than it usually did, and her limbs were screaming at her to move. Kel couldn't take any credit away from the fact that her claw hadn't moved from her groin either. She actually was graced by a touch of anger in that moment.
Here she was, in a base full of illegal plasma-contractors, steaming like a desperate doe.
It wasn't that she was horny that pissed her off, moreover it was the everpresent knowledge of why she was horny that made it unbearable.
There was no one else in her life that could touch her. She had never let anyone touch her, not even her own mother and father when she had been tiny, before they had died. She had only ever let Talner touch her. She let him touch her feathers, her claws, her hips.
Gods, were all males of his species this dense? Or was it just him?
She had never directly asked for it, but she had figured the passive permissions would've been enough. She possessed the physical traits to claim any mate she wanted. Talner was a vibrant, fertile youth. For what little she had seen of his form, she knew it was streamlined with muscle, and that he was slender, and quickly built.
Kel licked her snout again. She now had a craving for chocolate and sex. And there was only one place in the entire universe where she could hope to get both.
Talner.
The T'vaoan cawed in agitation and wriggled her knuckles into the material of her jumpsuit. She could feel herself through it, bulging, sloping. Everything was much too plush for her normal mood to be present.
Kel was always annoyed at everything around her most of the day, because, well, at the end of all things, the galaxy sucked ass in her eyes.
All that foul moodiness clenched things up a bit, if one could catch her drift.
But at night, when all the other contractors were out like lights, and the nocturnal cycles of her and Talner were about? Kel-Yn-Gor might as well have modified herself into an active basin.
Normally, her kind mated from behind. It was the form of their bodies that forced that prerogative. Males were quite hunched and females were quite capable of arching their backs to support the added weight.
It was why T'vaoans- who already possessed thicker muscles in their legs to make leaps that could transcend several stories –were particularly known for their hips when it came to physical looks.
Ripping the sheets from her, Kel could see that now her mind was looking at everything through a lens of arousal. Her legs were streamed with layered, black-fleshed bands of interlocking sinews and tendons. The insides of her thighs culminated into a tight wedge of constricted skin that invariably hugged the edges of her vaginal trench.
Everything down there itched and quivered. The Kig-yar cawed quietly whilst she jammed the knuckles of one of her claws into her slit through the material of her suit.
Linen slipped over itself in the coming seconds as she disrobed. The jumpsuit glimmered in the dark as a discarded heap on the ground. Kel-Yn-Gor gave off a needy caw and worked to spread the taught material of the suit's torso-wrap to expose her erect, black breasts.
The organs slouched like a pair of beanbags over the edges of the suit's opened midsection. She didn't bother pulling all the pieces of the article off. She just wanted an immediate way to access all the sensitive portions of her hide. Perfection in complete nudity be damned.
Talner.
-His name flooded through her mind like an icy river of water. She remembered the youthful details in his face, his ashy hair and the gleam of his eyes. He was so alien, smelling faintly of cologne, towering over her by almost two heads, enwrapped in a coat of creamy, soft skin completely lacking any claws or feathers or fangs…
Finding her organ, the Kig-yar teased at her labia with a pair of daggered talons before slipping the two center fingers deeply between the onyx-tinged lips of her vent. Immediately a slight ejaculation of clear fluids flooded past her knuckles and slipped silently down the crevice between her full rear-end.
Kel's snout shivered and her fangs clacked. The T'vaoan blinked in the dark and began to swivel her leathery palm. The cot squeaked as she kicked her backward-pedaled legs into the air and held them there.
Fluids glistened her talons and moistened a damp patch in the sheets below her. The Kig-yar's crimson throat-warble wiggled like a ripe fruit. An inhuman chirping sound blossomed from her and her feathers itched.
Talner.
Kel didn't think of herself as an imaginative person, but the images she was constructing in her head were exemplary, to say the least.
She pictured Talner's creamy body hanging over her own. He was thin in these visions, laced with muscle, and powerful with ironed-in experience. She imagined her smaller form bobbing against the cot, his calloused fingers gripping her hips with such force that it hurt. She pictured her avian form rocking with desperation against him, as the human rammed his organ deeply into her personal canal.
His mating organ.
Kel exhaled in a volcanic hiss. This air turned into a drawn-out, tremoring moan whilst her taloned fingers dipped repeatedly into her hole. The inside of her vagina felt silky in contrast to the more rubbery-feel of her skin. Her claws were like rough extrusions brushing walls of silk.
Her plumage shivered and she clenched her jaws shut to stifle herself from any passerby.
Eayn's Grace; why can't that human fuck me until it hurts?
Liquid spilled over her knuckles and ruined the sheets underneath her. Her muscles lapsed and kicked teasingly as she ejaculated, sending the Kig-yar into a series of caterpillar-styled, bodily spasms.
Ironically, her mind clung desperately to the cool sensation of Talner's skin touching hers, and the exotic, musty scent of chocolate. In response, her body overheated, and soon glistening beads of sweat were sprinting down her breasts and her black little abdomen. Her fluids permeated the air with their wafting stench, which smelled closer to some kind of spicy fruit than chocolate.
The T'vaoan gave off a drunken- 'Crawwwwwttt~…' –like drawl around her teeth and slumped into the cot.
In the moment, she couldn't have felt better.
It was afterward that the realization would set in. Just another night of useless finger-fucking for herself.
She didn't want to use her fingers, she wanted Talner, and most of the days she couldn't even bring herself to admit it.
Kel shut her eyes and stewed with a developing disappointment broiling in her chest. She tried to ward it off by kneading one of her black tits, but the Kig-yar was by now thoroughly adept at killing her own moods.
The magic was gone, as it were.
Damn.
Kel-Yn-Gor rolled her mandible and made to sit up in her cot. Usually, on the rare occasions where she couldn't control herself, she would find a rag to wipe away all the evidence. Tonight was no different in that sense at least. A spare cloth nearby sapped up all the precious nectar she'd expunged and dampened the already dark stains she'd left on the linen.
It isn't as if anyone is running room examinations.
She grinned sadly after padding away the rest of her mess.
A vibrant image of her and Talner appeared in her mind. She imagined the two of them in the aftermath of such a bodily union. These imaginary clones were giggling to one another, like conspirators, like children hiding a secret.
Kel's chest fluttered and her feathery mane wiggled down her spine. It was as if her very flesh was becoming angry at her for her unwillingness to accept how lonely she was.
She was a mercenary contractor. There wasn't exactly a great guarantee of companionship in that job description. She supposed it was deserved and just. She'd killed way too many people to earn the rights to happiness anyhow.
There are pages that cannot be undone.
Kel smiled wider, this time with exhaustion. Her mother's words were phantasms to her and things so old that they threatened to leave her memory forever.
Some pages can be rewritten. You must fear the ones that can only be touched by our hands once before they are permanent.
Her mother liked to talk about life a lot.
Kel-Yn-Gor regretted having never truly listened to her before she had died, old, and alone, back on T'vao, mending chicks who weren't even hers, being lost in delirium that still made her longer dead father walk the halls of her hut with her after his passing.
She bundled her cast-off jumpsuit and held it close to her chest, feeling the warm enrichments of her arousal as her nerves settled and her cunt stopped itching at her to touch it.
I'm sorry.
Kel chattered like a crow, smiling venomously.
She had to remember that her mother wasn't listening. Nobody ever was out here, except for one man.
Talner.
She determined that night, that she would ask the human to run away with her, and soon.
{👾}