Featherkisser
3
Kuhaga splashed the water over his face and didn't bother drying it off. The coolness it promised was more relieving than the numbers being read to him were.
"Do you want me to keep listing this off, or do you know already?" –Tollen's croaky-voice etched into his hearing, but Kuhaga kept his eyes closed and felt the droplets fleeing down his forehead.
"I've got an inkling." He responded quietly.
"It's time for me to blast off home, Ku'." Tollen slapped the datapad on the rim of the portable sink-unit down with an air of distaste. Kuhaga didn't care, however, because he had long ago given up trying to find activities that didn't annoy the old privateer. "You've got your plasma, I've got my credits. I've stuck my neck out too long and my boys are antsy."
"You just don't like my Kig-yar." Kuhaga grumbled, still intoxicated by the water running down his face.
"You bet your infantry-herded, gaunt arse' I don't." Tollen clucked. "I get you're dumping 'em all off on Refuse, but this mixed crew you got going? It's a darned shame, really, because I thought the war taught you something smarter."
"War doesn't teach, it just forces you to survive." Kuhaga snatched a rag off the other counter and dried his face, staring impassively at the grimacing, pale-skinned giant of a man standing on the other side of the sink. "That's why heroes are always martyrs."
"What about the Spartans?" Tollen smugly grinned. Kuhaga creased his lips. He had almost forgotten about the privateer's strange fascination with the legendary super-soldiers of olde', still said to be seeing new generations back home in Alliance space.
"Never met one." Kuhaga warmly hummed, stepping away from the sink.
"Ah, but ya' saw them." Tollen followed him, crossing his meaty arms over his barreled chest. The fatigues didn't suit him. They stretched and strained against all the muscles. Kuhaga was used to seeing him dressed in full scavenged plate. "On Emerald, down in that market square? They saved a whole planet right in front of ya'."
"They played their part." Kuhaga hid the resultant shiver at the mention of his veteran years. "But everyone on Emerald played their part the best they could. The Covenant still glassed half the equator."
"Half a victory's still better than getting your balls ripped off." Tollen shrugged nonchalantly. "Kinda' brings us back to what we were talking about…"
"Tollen, if you leave now, you're opening us to all sorts of trouble." Kuhaga had reached the other side of his chambers now and was sorting through some of the toiletries hastily piled beside his cot. He found a tube of toothpaste and a pink colored toothbrush.
"Pink?" Tollen almost lost his shit in a series of giggles.
"Shut the fuck up, it was all we had."
"Brass-tacks, Kuhaga, brass-tacks." Tollen held up his giant hands as the sink roared again. "Tg-66's a dry thing. You have your plasma, and the burn-tanks are running so long as you have that bird of yours hitting them in the right spots. If there was going to be a problem, it woulda' happened already."
"I'm not talking about the crabs." Kuhaga muffled as he swiveled the brush over his teeth. He spit into the sink and rinsed the brush. "Tollen, I brought you on this operation not just for old times' sake."
"Obviously," Tollen rolled his eyes. "you know better about me working with Covvies' on the same job."
Kuhaga huffed.
Tollen was the leader of a band of contractors who specialized in the kind of protection Kuhaga's engineers needed to harvest the plasma he was so renowned for gathering.
Of course, choice members of Kuhaga's band were no pushovers themselves. Kuhaga himself was a decommissioned NCO of the UNSC Marine Corps, and there was a sniper by the name of Talner Tolworth who was former ODST under his employ.
But for the handful of soldiers Kuhaga's band had at their disposal, they didn't add up to the ex-ONI branch commandos and the trio of ODST 'Hell-Spitters' –that Tollen was running amok with. Tollen was former Arcadian Defense Garrison Special-Operations, and he'd taken to mercenary work much faster than anyone else on Tg-66 had.
Tollen sported an intolerance to non-humans that Kuhaga did not suffer from. Kig-yar were easy to recruit in the Post-War years and made decent soldiers. While Kuhaga could respect that, Tollen could hate it, and always did.
It was the only thing that made them butt-heads, aside from the asinine assemblage of the latter's attitude and the prior's stubbornness.
Made for each other, an old sergeant in the corps had joked during an officer's club meeting.
That night still made Kuhaga laugh.
"I was actually thinking about all this, to rewind," Tollen spoke out loud, pacing towards the back of Kuhaga's chambers. The big man swept his gaze around the room appraisingly, as if he sought something in the natural limestone walls. "-we've been here all this time, watching you lot hoard plasma to sell to people who shoot at our former brothers. I was thinking; should we be ashamed about that?"
"You weren't us." Kuhaga smiled politely. "And for me, it's just cruel business."
"I'm just making sure."
"I'm telling you that it's until the burn-tanks are full. Besides, if you take your men away from my digsite now, and something happens, I'll never be able to wire the funds." Kuhaga reminded. "We are on the borders of the Sangheili colony of Kloitan. Do you remember who essentially owns Kloitan?"
"Yeah." Tollen grumbled. "R'ha, or whatever the hell those split-lips call themselves. It's a gun-runner clan, Ku', they aren't interested in this rock."
"Mark my words, if they found us here, there would be issues." Kuhaga denied. "I'm not worried about R'ha as a clan; I'm worried about who they pay."
"Maybe they can pay for a therapist to help ya' with this paranoia." Tollen snatched up the datapad by the sink again and smirked at the plasma-readout charts. He whistled. "-For a bird, I gotta' give your engineer credit. He's good, with all this Covvie' tech. What's his name again? Tater-tot? Lucy?"
"Yamva." Kuhaga coughed.
"Where'd ya' dredge him up from?"
"Asteroid colony on the rim of Chu'Ot's orbit." Kuhaga said. "He knows Covenant technology better than most. He's the only one I don't plan on leaving behind."
"He's a veteran I take it?" Tollen smiled, looking up from the pad. "Ya' know, of the war?" He asked, still smiling.
"Of course." Kuhaga nodded. "Non-combat role, I promise."
"So he says." Tollen shrugged and giggled, looking back down at the pad. Kuhaga eyed the pistol latched to the mercenary warlord's hip purely out of habit.
"Can I hear you promise me that you won't abandon us to the wolves?" Kuhaga grunted.
"Ya' got my word." Tollen sighed. "But it's only for you. Half of these lads you have running about would shrivel in my band, and the other half are birds, which means they're good for nothing else but target-practice."
"Ironically," –Said a third voice from the mouth of the chamber. "-they ain't half bad shots themselves for it."
"Talner." Kuhaga greeted with a slight incline of his head. Tollen merely grunted and glanced at the approaching sniper over his broad shoulder.
Talner smiled on thin lips and blinked warmly at the two of them. He was lugging his sniper rifle over his shoulder, fiddling with the release clamp beside the mag eject.
"Good kills this evening, lad?" Tollen looked up from the datapad in his hand.
"Fifteen, sir." Talner nodded. "The land crabs are amok to-night."
"Fancy that shite'." Tollen pocketed the pad and saluted briefly as he wandered out the chamber. "You've got my guns, Kuhaga, alright? Just get your plasma and pop off before I lose my patience."
"Don't sweat." Kuhaga grinned, and turned his attention to Talner, who was watching Tollen until he vanished around the archway capping the hall ahead. "Lower your guard, Talner, he's an ally."
"-Of convenience." Talner muttered when he was sure Tollen was out of earshot. "I don't like the way some of his boys are lookin' at me. I think they think I'm some sort of traitor, I reckon."
"He doesn't like aliens." Kuhaga shrugged. "You hang around that bird too much, Tal'."
"I hold my own." Talner ignored him. "Yes I'm here for reasons."
"Speak."
"The crabs are out of control. When the other guy relieved me, he had to start shooting straight two-secs' after he knelt down." Talner shook his head. "Call me crazy, but I think those cavern-crawling things are learning the rotation cycles of our sharpshooters."
"And Tollen calls me paranoid." Kuhaga uncharacteristically chuckled.
"Can we take it as another sign ta' get the hell off this rock?" Talner blinked.
"Sure." Kuhaga shrugged again. "The burn-tanks are almost full. Yamva's fixing sortes are keeping us on schedule. Pretty soon we'll load up and head on out."
"You haven't told us who the buyers are." Talner said.
"It isn't important."
"I understand."
"Do me a favor and check with the tower relay before you turn in," Kuhaga pointed at the limestone ceiling. "if they smell something, you and me are the first to know."
"Right." Talner shifted the weight on his boots. "…Kuhaga, I need ya' to talk straight with me."
"…Not this again." Kuhaga huffed under his breath, earning a galled stare from the sniper in response. "The buyer's contractor, like us. No strings attached. R'ha's dark. We don't have any split-lips up our asses."
When Talner didn't say anything, Kuhaga's features softened.
"I wouldn't screw you." He told him matter-of-factly. Talner suddenly wanted to shoot him.
"…Yes sir." The sniper blinked. "That's… all I needed to know, sir."
"Goodnight, Talner." Kuhaga saluted.
"Goodnight, sir."
{👾}
The tower team had nothing to report. Talner's efforts to reach them were answered only with the drowsy tech-guy offering a shake of the head and a half-hearted tap of his finger across the screen on his monitor. The scanners were blank, as always. Talner bid the team goodnight and retired, the whole time, his mind awash with paranoia.
The plasma buyers most certainly were not contractors. No bands active in the local subsector had the cash to spend on this much munitions, much less the equipment with which to use it. Covenant tech was a hard commodity for non-Sangheili or Kig-yar led groups, and seeing as Tollen, Kuhaga's warlord buddy was in on the deal too, he doubted the buyers were in any sense alien.
The night was long and mostly sleepless, leaving him with horrid bags under his eyes when he crawled out of the cot and made his morning caffeine brew. The bitter drink ran like molasses down his throat as he roamed the tunnels of the digsite, making his way up to the trench, just to get a whiff of fresh air before his runs.
Existence here was mostly boring, and constantly on edge. He had to remember that as long as nobody was shooting at them, then his job revolved around sitting about and waiting. Kel was the only Kig-yar he got along with, and most of the other humans here he had never met before, and so he had no pattern to fall into with them.
The only other people down here up for conversation- possibly –was Yamva, and he disliked Yamva almost as much as Kel hated him.
Even now, as Talner blinked the dim morning-light of Tg-66 from his eyes, he didn't notice Yamva's diminutive assistant, Taptap, until he had almost tripped over the stout little alien.
"-Excuse me~!" Taptap bashfully squeaked at the galled sharpshooter, slipping away with a toolbox tucked under one of his chitinous arms.
Talner watched the Unggoy waddle away quickly and with purpose, shrugging at whatever was so urgent to call the gas-sucker's haste.
Yamva must have made up something for him to do, he sipped his caffeine and thought about it for a moment. If Yamva hates him so dang much, then why hasn't he killed him yet?
Talner grunted to himself and scaled one of the plateaux walks skimming the side of the trench. The always gray sky was just a little lighter today and the wind wasn't as brisk.
Across the way, Gingerback yawned like a fierce predator. The big cave roared hollowly in the backdrop as the mineral falls crashed ceaselessly inside its bowels. Even from here, he could smell a slight whiff of sulfur. He tried burying his nose in the caffeine to rid his nostrils of the scent.
"-Burn-stick?"
Talner almost jumped out of his boots when someone croaked by his flank.
The ex-ODST whirled around so fast that he spilled some of his caffeine on the wrist of his jumpsuit. Grimacing in annoyance, he found himself gazing past his mug into the creamy eyes of a stout, twitchy Kig-yar of Kuhaga's crew. The male was thin, thinner than even engineer Yamva, and he held a deactivated energy shield in one of his clenched, four-fingered fists. The alien looked so high-strung that veins were bulging on his tan, wiry neck.
"What did you sa-"
"-Burn-stick?" The Kig-yar cut him off, his milky eyes darting to Talner's lips, and then to his belt.
"Are you asking for a cigarette?" The sniper cringed, stepping back from the alien's forwardness.
"Burn-stick. Put in mouth. Puff-puff." The Kig-yar tried to simulate some kind of sucking motion, but instead, it just came out as a prolonged whistle through his front fangs, he even pinched a pair of fingers in front of his snout for good measure.
"I don't smok-"
The Kig-yar was already stomping away. He found one of Kuhaga's human sentries wandering nearby and didn't even have to ask before the DMR-wielding guard flipped out a cigarette and lighter and lit the alien up without question.
Nearby, Talner snorted in disgust and went on his way.
I didn't know hookin' 'em on human narcs' was part of the job description for either-or.
Aside from such, it was a relatively clear day, which meant the trench-crabs wouldn't be so crazy and he had some time to himself. The lack of sleep made him sluggish, however, and so as he walked, he failed to return a salute from a passing guard merely because he had been too exhausted to notice.
I need ta' think about patches, he realized with a sense of horror, sipping the last of his caffeine.
At the top of the walk was an overlooking extrusion from the rocks nested behind more rings of boulders and a trio of work lamps. He didn't need to sniff her out to find her, or her favorite spots.
Kel-Yn-Gor was perched up there, on top of one of the sharper boulders, looking down at the trench below, much like an eagle overseeing a wide valley it viewed as its own.
A slight gust of wind rustled the T'vaoan's feathers and made her narrow her eyelids to protect her amber treasures from the breeze. If she noticed his approach, she did not immediately give voice to it. He had to clear his throat to garner her attention.
"Yo." The human grinned, taking a seat on a nearby rock pile.
"Yo." Kel croaked quietly, risking him a single glance, before she returned her gaze to the darkness of the trench far below. She seemed to be searching for something in the shadows down there.
"How're ya' doing?" Talner crammed his empty mug into his belt pouch and slapped his knees to wake himself up.
"You look exhausted." He looked up to find Kel staring piercingly into his soul. It made him jump in his own lap and laugh.
"Yeah, I didn't get many zee's last night." He admitted sheepishly.
"Are you ill or not feeling yourself?" The avian reptile asked, placing one of her lithe legs down and off the rock. She bobbed, almost like a tropical crane mid-step as she lifted herself off the boulder and to his level on the dirt. "…The caffeinated cups normally… arouse you."
"There's an interesting word for ya'." He made fun of her with an awkward brow-raise. "-Arouse? You mean, like, reanimate? Yes, I know what you mean. Most of the time, I'm a zombie when I first crawl out of that cot. It's too stiff, these things."
"I agree." She chattered her fangs and nipped at an irritation developing on her shoulder with a nibble of her beak. The red organ capping her throat warbled and she crooned at him, stepping closer. "Are you certain you aren't ill?"
"Nothin' of the sort." He shook his head, chuckling when the Kig-yar cupped his chin and leaned closer to examine him. He swatted her claw away and smiled. "-Hey! I got fifteen of the buggers last night."
"Fif-teen?" She mispronounced, her eyes going wide. "-I do not believe this."
"Believe it and weep, honey." He sniggered. "I guess they were just waitin' for the honor of getting killed by yours truly. I'm flattered."
"Hmmph." The Kig-yar pouted, her feathers sticking bolt-upright behind her head as she squinted and turned her snout up at him. "Dumb luck." –She croaked.
"Someone's jealous." Talner laughed.
"Jealous." She snorted, kicking her foot through some of the dirt. She was brooding. "Jealous of what? Someone who shoots straight but leads in circles?"
"Waitasecnow', what?"
"Nothing." Kel quickly wheezed. It would've come out as a cough, but, being Kig-yar, it was instead an avian whistle. It was as if her own beak was on the run from her thoughts, like it was eager to snap at him even when she willed it not to.
That hadn't been what she wanted to say. In fact, she had been talking about herself, and not him. Last night was a cold reminder in the back of her skull, suddenly, and it wouldn't quite go away.
To distract herself, Kel feigned a sneeze and wiggled her neckline. She tried to close her eyes and focus on a crisp wind developing from the west. It billowed calmly down from the eastern reaches of the gigantic trench around them and dissipated orderly.
Sensing her inner turmoil, Talner closed his mouth and tasted the last traces of caffeine on his tongue. He caught Kel-Yn-Gor in a cone of Tg-66 sunlight overhead as it streamed through the trench slit above. It gleamed off the western side of her skull-like beak and highlighted her eyes and her slender, inhuman body.
Obviously, something had her feathers in a twist. But somehow, she looked so… alien. She looked beautiful, even when she was angry.
"Ya' know something," He mumbled, staring. "ya' really are a pretty thing."
Wait, did I just say that out loud? Talner screamed in his own mind.
"-Crawt~!" She cawed in surprise and blinked at him. "There is no need to flatter me."
"I-I'm just saying-"
"So you killed more of the terrible little monsters than me? It is not a big deal. I do not harbor resentment towards you for it and-"
Kel might have had more to say in there, but she started to slip into her own native tongue, which was almost entirely incomprehensible to him. But, incomprehensible or not, Talner was quick to understand that this wasn't about the crabs anymore.
Enough time around Kel had earned him the skill enough to pick out a word or two. He heard something along the lines of 'last night' and 'thinking' –among all the bird-like crows and chatters, but after that, she lost him.
"Heyhey," Talner stood up and placed his hands on her wiry, yet full hips. The Kig-Yar squawked and looked away from him with an embarrassed fluster, her beak chattering as the last traces of her speech died off. "-serenity, honey. Let's find just a bit of serenity in there for ya'."
"Seren-ity." Kel mumbled, craning an eye to focus on the center of his cuirass, which was tantalizingly close to her face. "What is this word?"
"Peace of mind and whatnot." The sniper laughed, his accent forcing its way through the gesture to give it its usual tang that she had come to be so fascinated with. "You sound like something big is rattling around in your head. Ya' wanna' talk about it some?"
"It is nothing of any importance." She lightly ghosted from his grip and stood, avian-like before him, unreadable, as ever her alien physique sometimes allowed her to be.
"Maybe not to the job." He shrugged. "But who gives about the job? I'm asking about you. Let's talk."
"Talk." Kel grunted and kicked one of her raptornoid feet. The dirt seemed more interesting suddenly, only because it was easier to stare at and less embarrassing than her human friend. Even right now, Kel couldn't help herself but swoon slightly at his closeness, and the sweet little cologne smell he always trailed. "Yes. Yes, maybe talk would be good."
The human did this to her whenever he was close to her. Whenever he touched her. That, and whenever he gave her chocolate.
Speaking of which…
"…Did you bring chocolate?" She murmured hopefully.
Talner smiled and patted his belt.
"When would I ever show up without it?" He chuckled.
{👾}
"Take your voice down an octave." Yamva hissed, pressing a creamy eye past his shoulder. "The last thing we need is one of them getting a hint."
"-But-" Taptap raised a chitinous finger but stilled himself. Yamva could hear him struggling underneath his mask in the form of raspy currents of undertoning methane. It was very evident that the Unggoy was dangerously close to hyperventilating. "-But me not understand!"
"You don't need to." Yamva snapped, threatening his orderly with a chatter of his fangs. He twisted the wrench again and metal squeaked. "Did you bring the cutter like I asked?"
"Oh! The Burny-"
"Give it here~!" –The engineer nearly shrieked, causing Taptap to jump in his own harness and scramble for the toolbox.
Straddling the burn tank's flank, Yamva took a second to claw the metal pipe between his gnarly legs and snarl, attempting to bleed his characteristic rage in a moment of quiet.
Taptap looked endearingly stupid, even when his face wasn't visible. The Grunt's triangular tank was rocking back and forth as he rifled about the box's cluttered interior with his stubby chitin-paws. Yamva normally would've fantasized about some half-baked murder-scheme as he eerily watched his friend-emy from afar, but this time, he was feeling too tense, too strained by time to give such effort.
It was exactly the last problem. Time. He was running out of it, if he was correct about the internal politics of the dig site which he knew he was.
Kuhaga was taking the first option out. Tollen's gang was much more reliable than a band of former privateer Kig-yar and ragtag human mercs'. While he didn't fear the prospect of literally being abandoned on a dead-lit Confederate smuggling hole like the rest of his kind here were doomed to, he did fear his career from this point onwards.
Tollen was a known alien-hater. It was only a matter of time (that damned word again!) before Kuhaga disposed of Yamva once he had repurposed the right piece of Covenant tech. Yamva was in no mood to be screwed into something and tossed away once he snapped, just like the wrenches Taptap was sifting through.
"Hurry up." He growled.
"-Find!" Taptap wheezed triumphantly, waddling back over with a cylindrical shaped piece of purple metal in his grip. "Me find it, Yamva."
"I know." The engineer snapped, snatching the fusion cutter away. Nearby, the burn tank produced a sharp clunking sound that was evident over the roar of the mineral waters. Yamva took his gaze off the pipe underneath him for a second and sneered. "On the verge of death again. The pay isn't worth this. I should've retraced my claws and-" Clung~! –he ripped out the wrench and tossed it at the box. "-settled-! –a long time ago."
Taptap kept on wheezing, even as both their facial features were lit a bright neon pink. The fusion cutter hissed loudly and cast errant, blue-colored sparks. Yamva was chattering and cursing in his native tongue the entire time, ranting about the possibilities, the missed opportunities.
The missed opportunities! He could've screamed anyone's ear off about those blasted things.
This right here was why the war had ended in nothing but a gigantic stink-hole of a mess. It took billions of people, threw them in a swirling toilet bowl and shat them out in every-which-way. Yamva had been lost the moment the Covenant dissolved, forgetting service deployment.
I wonder what Rykol is doing right now, as I sit here, plotting the demise of the only home I've had in years.
Yamva snorted and clicked off the fusion cutter.
She'd probably nested with some other fool by now. Rykol had that kind of talent. Netting in overeager males looking for a heritage to pass down. Yamva didn't even know where his six chicks were these days. She'd spirited them away before he, and that antique pistol latched to his hip could've stepped in to say otherwise.
"Y-Yamva," Taptap muttered, stepping a bit closer, causing the Kig-yar to flinch out of his thoughts from the stink of methane coming off the Unggoy's harness.
He smells like ass, Yamva quirked an agitated eye at him.
"-Yamva, I not get what we doing. First, you tell me that Old People bad, and that we starting new. Then, you say mean humany people are friends and other Kigg are friends. Now," The Unggoy gestured to the warping cut that had been made on the interior grate-mesh of the pipe. "-now you trying to blow them up."
"You will keep your voice down or I will kill you." Yamva threatened, waving the fusion cutter at him for good measure. Taptap yipped and stepped back from the pipe.
Unfortunately, the little alien stepped too far back, and his heel met the edge of the thin plateau-walk housing the burn tank. Pebbles crumbled, and Taptap whined as he flung out his little arms and spiraled them, his weight tugging on his tank, nearly sending him in a fatal tumble down into the sharp rocks sticking from the mineral waters.
"This is always what I have to deal with, I know it! Some loud-mouthed, gas-sucker who can't count to five and was probably conceived from the rear of his nest-mother." Yamva growled, gripping Taptap by the nose of his mask, and yanking him to safety back on the main plat of earth. "I'm tired of it." The engineer specified, staring with creamy, but blank eyes at the terrified Unggoy. "But I think I'm more tired of nothing."
"W-What you mean, Yamva?" Taptap stuttered, afraid to make any other moves besides wrapping his arms over his narrow gut protectively.
"Isolation, don't you see it? Why else would I tolerate you for so long, for all these years? I've found its better to have someone to hate, than to have no one at all." Yamva glowered, not letting go of his mask. "Think of the time I wandered around aimlessly before you. Metal makes poor company, but that is where my profession brought me. You think I don't have demons? I have too many. Here I stand, on the crest of betrayal, and I'm pouring my soul out to a mollusk midget who smells like an unwashed Jiralhanae's anus."
"I-I sorry, Yamva…"
"Not nearly sorry as me." Yamva let the Grunt go, chattered and stepped back over to the pipe. "You wish to know the truth? Fine. I shall relent that quietly, seeing as you're the only one I can trust."
"Really?" Taptap brightened a little bit and fiddled with his fingers. "Yamva always know best, that what I say. All you say true. Taptap never good for much anyhow. Taptap told he never get chosen by Old People because too late in Big War to make difference, but Taptap know truth. I get thrown away, like many of my kind. Because when there not bullets to take we mostly useless. Times and times of wasted hatchlings and wasted generationy things. Once overheard Elite-man saying so, before I ran away."
Yamva paused as he screwed the pipe-hatch shut and glanced at him, grunting something behind his teeth that might've been an affirmation.
Even as angry as he was, he couldn't hold back the summary shock that always came out when Taptap invariably, and continuously proved that he wasn't as fucking stupid as he looked.
Taptap was waiting for the Kig-yar to interrupt him or scold him for cutting off whatever he had been about to say beforehand, but nothing came out of the engineer's beak. Taptap huffed through his rebreather and padded his fingers together.
They clicked clkclkclk –in the silence of the water-roaring behind them.
"Yamva?" Taptap asked. "You keep me around to hate me?"
Yamva paused as the hatch went back on. His avian shoulders hunched, and the spines sticking from the back of his narrow head quivered as he chuckled.
"I keep you around because I have nothing else to keep around." The Kig-yar clarified. "That, and you always serve as a reminder that I am not the most depraved thing meandering through the stars. There are those less than me and you're one of them. Having proof of that helps me sleep at night. Does that answer your question?"
Taptap stared at his own feet.
"Yes, Yamva." The Grunt said dryly. He tried adjusting one of the knobs on his mask for methane dispersal, but it didn't seem to help.
"Good. Hand me that wrench," As Taptap complied, the engineer took a glance at the head of Gingerback and started to speak again. "-and for the truth you sought."
"Yes, Yamva?"
"The humans are planning on leaving the rest of my kind on a very bad, desolate planet." Yamva explained. "I doubt they'll include payment with it. They'll probably load everyone up on separate ships, shoot down or disable the others they aren't on and steal the plasma-ore out of the wreckage. And they'll probably kill you the moment I am not looking."
Taptap flinched but otherwise did nothing to react to that.
"Afterwards, Kuhaga, Tollen's men and… and I'm assuming that sharpshooter, Talner," Yamva jealously ground his beak. "will even leave Kel-Yn-Gor to die and will take me as their slave-laborer, probably to repair some significant piece of Covenant haul. Think about it, it's the perfect compromise for the alien hater that Tollen is. Use the engineer to get a Phantom or two going, and then make off for greater jobs and greater pay. Shoot the poor bastard. No witnesses."
"But if group breaking up," Taptap started. "how you get away without pay?"
Yamva's smile was eye-to-eye, for his anatomy.
"Simple." He grunted, patting the pipe once he was done. "Give this a day, at most, and watch the lights."
"Then whats?"
"There are three ships on Tg-66. The hauler schooners and the Phantom, tied to the Tower base, at the top of this cave's trench." Yamva pointed up at the ceiling. "The ore's being loaded on all three of them. Each has enough tanks on it to make any one Kig-yar rich. I can deal with the cut-off."
"You take me too?"
Yamva looked back at the Grunt and his smile diminished a little.
"Yes," He relented with a sigh. "I'm taking you too."
"You best, Yamva." Taptap itched his mask.
"I know." Yamva chattered.
{👾}
A ramshackle lift was the only thing dividing them from Tg-66's surface crust. The thing shrieked, wobbled and sparked all the way up a set of support rungs that had been hastily erected. Talner hated it, not just because of the sitting sensation in his gut that the lift could break and plunge them to their deaths any second, but because of the racket, the mechanisms howled all the time.
At the end of the day, if his demise was unavoidable, the least the universe could do was make his end peaceful.
Clambering down a rust-heap of scrap down an entire cliff-trench wasn't exactly a situation worth shitting dandelions over. Especially when you hit the bottom and every bone in your body became-
"Is there something wrong?" Kel asked, her beak full of chocolate. "Talner?"
"-Wha'? No. Nothin'." Talner grinned fakely. He hadn't even realized that he had been staring at her that entire time like a bloody creep.
Kel Yn Gor, for her part, nodded almost sagely and went back to focusing on the half-eaten candy bar in her claw. Though she kept stealing furtive glances at him even as the tip of her beak parted and she snuck a bite. Her chewing faltered when the lift shrieked and the platform jolted to a stop. Sunlight dappled off both of them in an instant tsunami of illumination.
"-Ugh~." The Kig-yar clicked her teeth and swallowed, bringing up a feathery arm to shield her daggered eyes. "Too bright."
"You said it," Talner grunted, bowing his head a little bit for the combat helm on his head to take the edge off the light. "I feel like a ground-goblin crawlin' out from hell for the first time."
They rarely got surface patrol duties due to the crab problem, and it wasn't like Kuhaga was willing to expend too much leisure time on the operation.
In total, anywhere from thirty human and Kig-yar crewmembers made up Kuhaga's band and around fifteen mercenaries were wandering about with Tollen's colors. Kel and Talner were Kuhaga's only real sharpshooters, and he needed those to control the Land-Crabs at night.
Still, all of that had equaled to a long, drawn-out crapshoot that consisted of hours on end searching around for a whole lot of nothing and occasionally shooting a scavenger. The problem with the crabs was that they rarely attacked en masse, but pinpricked on the edges of the camp with foragers that would go back and bring more swarms if they returned to the trench alive. They were like ants. Big, metal-crunching, dog-sized ants.
"Morning, Tal'." Susanne greeted with a tiny half-grin. She didn't bother acknowledging Kel, who was used to such treatment anyhow.
"Top of it." The sniper nodded, looking around the landing valley, and where the tiny campsite known as the Tower lookout stood.
A wide berth of cragging foothills penned in the arid, small valley on the very edge of the trench. Ahead of them was a rocky bowl of sloping rock, jagged teeth and fields of stalagmites. Two cigar-shaped Eschell-class Hauler Sloops were set down on a natural plane of limestone just ahead, flanked by a small pile of empty crates meant to store the mining equipment they were using down in the trench.
Beside the Eschells, levitating off a man-sized, repurposed docking dais that had been salvaged from some old pre-Covenant wreck, was a Type-44 Phantom Gunship. The looming vessel hung ten feet off where the humming plasma dais was placed like some kind of fat, shadowy portent.
Talner always blinked whenever he saw it coming up from the lift. It gave him bad memories from the War. He'd seen plenty of people killed by Phantoms when he was in the corps.
"A few of Tollen's boys loaded up with Shackie and took out the old bird, if you're wondering." Susanne reclined in a pink and blue colored fold-chair by the side of the lift ramp. The little aluminum lawn-piece creaked under her weight, seeing as she was in full battle plate and jumpsuit, like the rest of the band, colored black with navy blue over any spare pieces scavenged to replace gaps. "Kuhaga's flipping his head, huh?"
Kel chattered something under her breath as she stalked away from the lift, the sunlight no longer bothering her. Susanne was speaking of the Rotary Lifter they kept up here for air-drops and patrols. It was an old industrial chopper wing VTOL craft based off the military-grade Falcon designation used by the UNSC colonial corps.
They had one pilot for it out here and he was an eccentric little man named Shackie. Or, at least that's the name he'd made for himself. Even Kuhaga didn't know what really had been written on his birth certificate, not that anyone cared enough to pursue it. Shackie was viewed as harmless. He was just a floundering boob with flight experience.
"You said it." Talner smiled. "Me and Kel are just doing a quick sweep to get the legs moving."
"Have fun out there." Susanne eyed the Kig-yar's back for a moment and didn't call anything out. Most of Kuhaga's crew were indifferent towards the Kig-yar, but opinions generally were pretty decent with Kel.
After all, she was one of the few aliens here who wasn't a Covenant castoff and actually had a fair grasp on English and some Spanish. Tollen's boys hated her on principle, but, then again, they hated everybody who wasn't human.
"Did that engineer ever give us an estimate?" Talner asked just before he parted with Susanne. "Yamva's been toying with the tanks all day."
"Just another day or two, right?" Susanne faltered a bit in her chair, at least reassuring Talner that he wasn't the only one on his toes.
"Talner." Kel impatiently clucked nearby, wandering towards the center of the valley.
"Vox me if anything pops up." Talner pointed at the navy green cloth of the Tower, which in all actuality was a barracks tent laden with all the communications and sensor equipment the band had. He could hear the muffled voices of Huan and Chelsea inside the flaps; the other two goons up here all the time keeping the radios working.
Grak and Liop, the Kig-yar sentries armed with Carbine rifles patrolled deeper in the valley, navigating around stalagmites recreationally with animated arms, distant squawks making evident that they were bickering about some mundane subject like they always did.
At least some people like the quiet.
The valley breached through a dirt ramp and a clearing. Kel and he were wordless as they hiked it and came to a ridge on the landscape above.
The sunlight was blinding for a second without the protection of the foothills. But now, there was an ocean of rock and sand awaiting them, sloping out for hundreds of miles in any direction ahead. Far to the north, so distant that the rocks were faded with cloud-residue, another massive trench's teeth could be seen wriggling down the land like a gargantuan, spiked caterpillar.
Kel's groan next to him took away his gawking.
"If I lay eyes upon more sand off-world, I shall shoot myself." She grumbled, tickling his hip as she grabbed his belt without even warning him, and wiggled out another candy bar for her to munch on. "I did not think humans were so formal with masquing pleasure on deployments. We're on patrol?" –She crooned with amusement. "Yes, I'd assume at some point these rocks will be planning our downfall, up here, all alone and stewing in the wind."
"Ya' never know." He stepped down the hill in a heavy trot, already, his black gear becoming touched with tints of tan from sand-ghosts creeping in the wind. "We're almost outta' here, you'll see."
"You keep telling me this." Kel Yn Gor swallowed the candy bar and threw the wrapper away, making at first to grab her rifle but faltering and settling for fiddling with her talons. Her fingers itched and so did her feathers. It wasn't because of the wind. "Talner?"
"Lay it on me, honey."
Kig-yar were strange in their processing of… of this thing that she was undeniably feeling. At least, in regards to how humans handled it.
Nesting was a quaint term. It stuck around society since the days of sail ships on Eayn, and even when the T'vaoan people had begun to change because of their home's gravitational differences from their homeland. Nesting was a blanket word for the gathering of, obviously, a male and female to produce chicks for the sole purpose of continuing their lines and furthering their race.
Kig-yar did not breed for- as odd for her as it was to say –the humanity of it. Kig-yar did not hold other Kig-yar in that kind of light. An individual was meant to strive for wealth and power and influence. Chicks were just a means to gaining more of those things, or at least, they were meant to be.
Kel was too young to consider motherhood, and honestly, the idea of babies made her gut twist.
Not only was she a privateer with a lot of ugly things behind her, but the thought of raising a life after she had murdered so many others made her intestines weak and her eyes water. These were wounds well hidden all around, but they were there and they stung.
Kel Yn Gor didn't want to nest with Talner. She couldn't. Literally and figuratively. So what did one call what she wanted with him?
Was it just for sex?
Kel couldn't lie to herself and say she didn't think of Talner like that… at least… a lot of the time…
Kel squirmed in her harness as her avian, backward legs craned, almost peacock-like, to carry her across the sand and soil of Tg-66.
"I want to leave this job." She finally choked.
"You and me both." Talner shook his head, not getting the depth she'd meant for him. "It's maddenin' when you get locked into a routine."
"That is not what I'm saying." She chattered in frustration. "Talner… why is it that you are so smart some days and yet so blind?"
"Just tell me what's bothering you." He relented, and the two of them stared at one another as they walked into the endless wasteland. Even underneath his ODST helmet, she could feel Talner's eyes as they both connected to something that they had been dancing around like pathetic children. "Get it off your chest now, while we got the time."
"It is not such an easy thing." The T'vaoan chuckled sadly. "Understanding… everything, really. My life, before here and now, before this job, and all the others. Think about it like this: I can't even see merit in my own people because I have become so used to blowing their guts out and leaving it at that."
"…I know how it feels." He admitted, shouldering his rifle.
"You do?"
"Killing people." Hollow eyes were underneath his visor. "Yeah, that's a solid bit of poison to mess up your day."
When neither of them said anything, he continued with a slight, sour smirk.
"Enough to mess up every day, from there on out. And it seems like the galaxy's constantly trying to find ways to keep it going, that killin'." He elbowed the Kig-yar, and chuckled when she hopped back from him with an excited trill. "But hey, at least it's just crabs here this time, right?"
{👾}
The tanks in Gingerback were rigged to explode via remote. The activator was Yamva's datapad, where he normally kept his notes and specs on all the tech Kuhaga had collected from Covenant sources over the years.
There was part of Yamva that actually felt regretful about what he was essentially planning to do, gutting his own employers and all. But then again, the constant, hateful sneers of Tollen's mercs passing by in their rounds was enough incentive to remind him.
As soon as you're off this rock, those men are going to shoot you.
Yamva felt nothing when he and Taptap went to the next chamber over, and started to rig those tanks to explode too.
"This would be easier if the birds of prey roosted elsewhere…" The Kig-yar snarled under his beak, grinding his fangs as a pair of Tollen's soldiers hung out in the archway of Alpha Cavern. Alpha was a near duplicate of Gingerback. Yellowed limestone, piss-colored mineral water flowing from vents in the ceiling. The burn tanks here were fat with ore plasma to sell. Yamva felt a twitch in his bulbous eye as he worked.
He was literally using potentially tens of thousands of credits to fuel a bomb. He envisioned a vast pile of lucra-chits- the currency used by many Kig-yar asteroid colonies years before the arrival of the Covenant –and he envisioned them ablaze in primordial fire.
Well, with what he had in mind, thousands of credits being burned would matter little.
"Are your duties complete?"
"Yes, Yamva." Taptap hurried past, his motions made flippant by the bouncing, thudding mass of a large, sealed drum barrel that he rolled across the dirt. "Last drummy all sealed and ready."
Yamva grunted and craned his head around. Alpha had a total of sixteen tanks scattered throughout the natural causeways layering it. He had cut into all of them and rigged each of the feed-lines with a small, home-made disruption node that would cause a kick-back of sparks the moment they were set off. It would bring the chamber down, kill anyone inside, and cause enough panic to give him and Taptap the perfect cover to steal one of the Eschell schooners, filled to brim with plasma drums.
Clunk~! –went the drum as Taptap bumped into one of the burn tanks, the one closest to Alpha's entrance.
"Careful, you imbecile." Yamva snorted.
"Yes, Yamva."
Feeling a nausea-inducing wave of brief panic in his heart, Yamva swallowed and shakily stood as he finished welding shut the last tank's feed pipe. He tossed the fusion lance tiredly into Taptap's box and looked at his datapad, noticing his own claw shaking.
He growled and gripped his wrist. His claws used to shake like that when he had been a hatchling and his father was preparing to beat him. Yamva had hated pretty much every living soul he had ever encountered in his life. But he had never met anyone he had hated quite like his sire. His father was… something else.
So, to help cover his paranoia, Yamva envisioned him as still alive to this day. He envisioned his father, sleeping on one of the burn tanks in Alpha, snoring, intoxicated and plump with the sihha-seed soup he always made his depraved mother cook for him when he returned from off-world duty.
Yamva glared at the fat rotundness of the tank he had sabotaged. He could almost see the scrawny body of his father sprawled next to it, scorched, blackened, steaming and lifeless.
Yamva liked that picture.
He grinned and the quivering in his wrists stopped.
"You finished in there, bird?" One of Tollen's men hollered, standing aside with a sneer as Taptap rolled his plasma drum right between the sentries and out into the tunnel beyond.
Taptap had done that several times now, loading up the last of the Eschell's by the Tower. The time was now or never.
"The repairs are done." Yamva squawked earnestly, hiding the slight tremor in his voice. "The tanks breathe again. It is just one more load before we can all go home."
The two mercs sighed in response. They may have hated aliens, but they hated sitting on this damned rock even more with them.
Kuhaga would get his plasma.
Whether he went home with it was an entirely different story.
Yamva was about to step past one of the first tanks he had rigged close to the entrance of the cavern, he ran the blueprint of his plan through his head one last time.
He and Taptap would wait until nightfall. Once night fell, Yamva would take the lift to the ship port above the trench, detonate the bombs and run off with the Eschell before anybody could respond. Kuhaga could never track him, especially since Yamva had been the one who had installed the tracer devices in the rear fuselage shafts of the schooners himself.
He and that gas-sucking runt would be rich, and home free.
Perfect.
Right as Yamva thought that, grinning with his saurian muzzle, he glanced over at the tank casually, and then froze where he stood.
His eyes locked on the burn tank's feed, where a sizable dent was wrought right into the weld-line from Taptap's drum.
The little monster had hit the feed pretty hard. Hard enough to rattle things. Hard enough to-
Schiskk~!
-Yamva screeched. The inside of the feed was starting to glow amber, like a dancing flame.
Tollen's goons grunted when the Kig-yar shouldered between the two of them in a blazing sprint, the bird galloping, almost like a gazelle, out into the tunnels beyond. Soon his footfalls fell distant and silent.
"That little prick." One grunted, a man.
"Tollen said the aliens get lost after the job." The other, a woman, clicked her tongue. "That was the last batch." She flexed her brows.
Schiskk~! –whispered the burn tank's feed again. A snake's hiss.
"Did you hear something-"
Then, Alpha Chamber detonated, and the two soldiers were instantly incinerated.
{👾}
Susanne crushed the water can and tossed it at Huan's head, hitting him square in the temple.
"Ouch." The comms-man held his hair and glared at her.
"Ouch? That's all you can say?" She shrugged, reclining in the lawn chair.
"What else am I supposed to say, you bully?" He turned back to playing with the scanning rig inside the tent. Susanna had tugged her chair over to lounge just outside the opened flap. It made taking aim at her poor buddy easier with all the cans and wrappers she went through. "I'm not a good insult-spinner and I can't throw anything back."
"I dunno', it's just so nonchalant." Susanne huffed. "Did your mom tell you to not hit girls or something?"
"Yes." Huan rolled his eyes.
"Well, she should know better. Bad girls don't learn any different from bad boys." She snarkily grinned.
"I've got a blip at 32 east." Chelsea called over from the other side of the tent. Huan only glanced at her and kept playing with the rig's dials. Susanne seemed entirely disinterested.
"It's just another devil." Huan said when nobody broke the silence. "I'll bet you a water can that it'll go away in five more seconds."
"Persisting." Chelsea squawked.
Susanne huffed. Neither her nor Huan liked Chelsea a whole lot. She was so robotic all the time, just staring at screens, refusing to partake in the banter the two of them had. Even the Kig-yar wandering around outside the tent were more lively than her. Susanna remembered one time actually playing catch with one of the birds for a whole three minutes with a crushed can. She couldn't recall which of them, though.
Grak? Wasn't that one? And Liop the other? Or was it Leap?
Kig-yar names were all gobbly-guk to her anyhow. A bunch of throat-slicing good-for-nothing alley scavs', every single one of them.
"What was the other one's name again?" Susanne took out another water can and tossed it up in the air before catching it. The chair creaked a bit under her back as she settled. "Liop? Leo? Dunlop? That was a tongue-twister. Or it was just so stupid that my brain turned it off and spaced it."
"I'll go with Leo." Huan muttered, itching a dial leftwards a bit as the rig's monitor whined. "I've almost got this, I think."
"Contact blip is moving."
Both of them looked at Chelsea. She was hunched over her scanner table, her eyes locked on a little pulsating dot dancing in the center of her readout.
"I repeat, this thing is moving. It is not a devil."
"We don't know that." Huan still didn't sound convinced.
"God damn it, let me see." Susanne dropped her can and jumped up from her chair, crossing to and leaning over Chelsea's flank. "Is that it?"
"Yes." Chelsea blinked when it moved again, this time, in the opposite direction from where it had appeared. Susanna gasped, and so this time, even Huan was standing up and looking. "Guys?"
"Wire out to Shackie." Huan said quickly, running over to a small locker and ripping the latch-door open. He grabbed a Vesor-brand Stut-Rifle and chucked it to Susanne. "Get him to land back here quickly. I'll go get the boomer."
"I'll tell Kuhaga." Susanne nodded, patting Chelsea's shoulder. "Keep an eye on it, and don't let it off the grid."
"Is it a ship?" Chelsea asked.
"That, or a flying space pig for all I know." Susanne made to run after Huan and then froze. "Oh crap, Talner and that bird are out there too."
"Should I tell Shackie?"
Thwump~!
-Both women jumped and ran to the mouth of the tent. The lift had just clunked into place outside on the trench rim, and, waddling down from its platform, rolling a plasma drum, was engineer Yamva's little assistant, Taptap.
The Grunt got the drum on the correct angle and was just rolling it towards the Eschells when he noticed the two humans staring at him. He stopped rolling, leaned an elbow on the drum tiredly and waved at them enthusiastically.
"Taptap loading last haul, like boss-man says." He giggled. "Nothing sussy-pickious here!"
Huan- ignoring the alien –ran over to a fabricated metal sheet nearby in the sand, with an object hidden beneath a tarp placed in its center. He ripped the tarp free and let the wind take it, revealing a mounted, foot-pedal Guass-Cannon setup. Huan leaped onto the skeletal frame and activated the targeting computer, heaving as he yanked the man-sized barrel to face the desert sky above.
Bmmmmmm~! –suddenly, the ground was rumbling.
"We're under attack!" Chelsea trembled.
Susanne didn't know whether to deny or agree to that. She was too busy staring at the orange mushroom cloud rising from the trench right behind Taptap and his drum.
"…That… wasn't supposed to happen yet." The Unggoy mumbled, even as his mask became highlighted at its edges with a vibrant, orange keen. He squeaked and started rolling the drum faster.
{👾}
"Get me a list of losses and get everyone outside. Start getting ready for a pullout." Kuhaga was barking orders left and right, hopping down one of the trench's causeways, half-naked and still trying to yank on his own fatigue pants. "Tollen!"
"On it." Tollen passed him by in a dexterous jog, tossing a Magnum as he went, which Kuhaga barely caught after he finished shimmying into his pant leg. "We've got a breach in Alpha Chamber, lads, form up with Tower defense and let me and the boss see what's going on."
"Martheen and Duos were at that post." –Crackled from Tollen's earpiece.
"I know." He said grimly.
"The engineer was there too." Kuhaga yanked the Magnum's hammer and sprinted, shirtless, between a handful of his Kig-yar scrambling to get to the Tower lift and out of the trench. "If he's gone, then the whole op is over anyhow."
"If he's gone." Tollen was murmuring under his breath. "This is what you get when you work with aliens, Ku', lots of shrapnel and dead folk lying around to high hell. They can't really do much else except kill and maim, even when they aren't trying to."
Only seconds after the explosion had the techs up at Tower voxed him about the mysterious blip that had appeared out in the deserts over the trenches. Kuhaga would be damned if that blip and this breach weren't connected. If it was R'ha, then they needed to move quickly before the clan could mount an effective attack.
Tg-66 was a pile of dirt, but it was still in that Sangheili band's territory. Kuhaga had never understood R'ha's fascination with Tg-66 or their refusal to get at the fuel-plasma ores flowing in its subterranean waters. All he had known was that they could've hidden here and gotten rich in record time.
In and out. It should've all been simple.
Now something just had to break. Part of him wanted to be mad at Yamva, but part of him was also mad at himself. Yamva had been warning him for days that the tanks were being driven into poor condition. It seems like his impatience had cost them both dearly. Or R'ha was already here and upon them.
The trench was drowned in rock-dust. Tollen shouldered through his own men and Kuhaga's gang as he beelined for the disturbance.
A trio of Kig-yar lithely dodged around Kuhaga as he ran, like a pack of agile gazelles, their cloven feet carrying them at shocking speeds that no human could hope to match. One of the Kig-yar looked vaguely familiar.
Kuhaga screeched to a halt and made to whip around and grab the alien. He clenched a scaly, salty-smelling arm and tugged hard, earning a sharp shriek that echoed through the choking dust around him.
"Yamva~!" He barked, jamming his pistol into the Kig-yar's beak. Kuhaga didn't know what to say after that.
You're alive? So you must have done something! –perhaps?
It was irrelevant. The Kig-yar in his clasp snarled at him and blinked one of its near translucent lids as it licked its teeth.
"Yamva? Hagh~! Yamva shriveled and burnt husk by now probably." The mercenary sneered. Not Yamva.
Kuhaga lowered his gun and released the avian's arm. The thin creature snarled before running back to catch up with its fellows.
"Run too, boss! Should run too!" It howled back.
"Kuhaga!" –Tollen's voice rung from the smog up ahead. "-Kuhaga!"
"I'm coming." Kuhaga mumbled to himself, coughing as he plunged into the smoke. The tunnel was a blinding hell. He bumped into rocks, walls and almost tripped over a few crates left in a corner.
Soon, through memory, he navigated to the entrance arch for Alpha Chamber. Immediately, his nostrils twitched as his nose picked up the smell of seared flesh and burnt hair.
Kuhaga grimly looked down at the blackened remains of a human arm, blown off its original owner and cast haphazardly into the scorched dirt of the tunnel. It was missing three fingers, and rubbery bits of a fatigue vest clung around the elbow.
"Tollen? Where are you?" Kuhaga stepped over the arm and pressed through the cracked arch. The smoke swiveled and cleared slightly, revealing Tollen, who was standing rigidly, his eyes locked on something below. "At least the whole chamber didn't come down." Kuhaga coughed, grabbing the merc's shoulder and shoving him aside. "-What are you looking at?"
"I'm looking at what your bird just did." Tollen mumbled, pointing.
Kuhaga swept dust from his eyes, and then found himself gawking.
Alpha chamber was gone. The rivers flowing through the rocky ground had vanished. The ground had vanished. The tanks across the chamber were nowhere to be seen and everything was painted a deep black from the pure heat. Flames still cracked along edges of rock, and steam shot out from falls of mineral water dappling from the cracked ceiling and onto the flame pyres. Jagged scrap metal from the tanks was embedded everywhere. A scorched human foot was nearby too, crisping as cinders danced across the pitch-black heel and bloody stump.
Where the floor had collapsed, and what shocked the two men, there stood something in the rubble.
Peaking from the mounds of earth and stone was a ruined, chiseled, and badly burnt figure. It was easily ten feet tall, down a three-story drop below, situated in the center of a buried antechamber lined with crumbling pillars, sweeping, vine-patterned stone plates with a plain dais in the heart.
At the foot of the Sangheilian statue, partially submerged, and very cracked, was a sarcophagus.
Even through the smog clouding the room, Kuhaga could see the small flashing light of a tiny, purple, arachnid device placed on the rim of the coffin. The security tripper blipped red from a central bulb, in the rocks, from where it had been knocked off the tomb's lid.
Tollen broke the silence with a slight, venomous chuckle.
"Yep." He grunted. "Fuck me."
{👾}