Featherkisser
4
"Was Ta-Vow a lot like this place?" Talner asked.
"T'vao was nothing like this rock." Kel clucked in amusement at his mispronunciation. "T'vao was a different kind of home. It was… ehm…"
"Ya' need a word?"
"Let me think of it." Kel shook her head politely. "…Flower-y. No. Poetic."
"Poetic?" The ex-Helljumper sounded confused as they hiked a dune. "That doesn't sound right."
"But it is very true." She insisted, beating him to the summit and watching him trudge the rest of the way up past her beak. "You cannot say it in so many words without it being confusing. Y'deio is not a sphere of simplicities and it is very complicated how people have changed from one another."
"Uh-huh." Talner said very seriously, listening intently as he capped the ridge and huffed.
"T'vao changed. They all changed, all of the colonies. It is the will of Kig-yar, to seek what is not known, and, yes, unfortunately, to also plunder what might belong to the vastness of space." Kel licked her muzzle and scanned the desert around them, their position offering a spectacular view. "But the veils of princedom never spoke to me. It was just a means to a meal."
"So, you're sayin' that you sum up Ta-vow pretty good then?" Talner smiled. "You're a product of home."
"I would not be saying an untruth agreeing with that." Kel shrugged. "Yet that isn't what I meant. T'vao breathes family and it breathes individuality. Families of my people are tightly knit social groups who maintained superiority through honor, swiftness and brutality. Streets were chopped up among petty princes and their lines. But they were not the scavenger scum you see from Eayn. Ancestors, no."
"You don't like Eee-en?"
"Hmpf~." She huffed, laughing at his words for her language, her feathers quivering with glee. "My tastes never quite took to it, no."
"Earth never really seemed all-that to me either. Ya' know, just because the road started somewhere, doesn't mean it didn't lead to something better at the other end." He reached out and cuffed her smaller shoulder playfully. Kel crooned and kicked her clawed foot through the sand like a pawing cat, her muzzle turning a slight shade of purple which was thankfully for her hidden by the high sun above. "We're both offworlders, eh?"
"It appears so." Kel hummed, and then she grabbed his belt again, yanking it towards her as her amber eyes darted about inquisitively.
"You ate all of it." He laughed at her sharply, doting on the shorter alien. "But heck, what I'd give to be a chocolate factory. It'd be something to make up for all the horrors."
"Why would you want chocolate? I'm the one who craves it." She licked her teeth and peered up at him, her feathers poofing, like a blooming, black sunflower behind her head. "It is the processed chemicals your kind uses, I am sure."
"-I'd wanna' be a chocolate factory just to see you smile more." He quipped. Kel made a flourishing noise of embarrassment and let his belt snap back onto his plate. "At least I know that that ain't a wrong thing to wish for."
"Maybe not." She nursed her Needle rifle. "Talner?"
"I'm here."
"How long have we been doing this?"
Talner scrunched his brow. That was a question he had to think about.
If they were going just by Kuhaga, then that was two years. Talner had joined up with Kuhaga shortly after the Primion Campaign, to escape the Jiralhanae he had so angered by killing their Chieftain in the world's mushroom jungles. Talner wished all this time later that he hadn't tried to spring out of retirement like that. It was a stupid stunt, one that a kid made, a really stupid kid.
And yet for some reason, that stupidity- of his own volition –had made him hate the UNSC even more than he already did.
The Alliance had never spoken his tongue. He'd disliked it from its conception to the present. He did not hate non-humans, and he did not hate his own kind, but the trauma, the things that High Command had ordered him to do…
Unforgivable. At least to him.
Primion was a mistake, and, so too was Tg-66. At least probably. Combat was a narcotic Talner did not know how to live without. The only way to stop the nightmares was to live them so that they did not return in his sleep.
Yet, every time he hungered for its usage, he despised himself for it. It was self-destructive. Perhaps, that was why he had warmed up so quickly to Kel, fifteen months ago, when a timid, avian alien had wandered up to him on the deck of Alpine Timberland, the astro-colony orbiting in the belt of Desilos-9.
She had come over to him because she had intended to rob him. She had just gotten the bad end of a job, and T'vaoan gangers were prowling the market-levels of the habitat seeking to kill her. She was unarmed, and she wanted the sidearm and combat knife that Talner had unwisely left unhidden on his belt.
Talner remembered the first thing he had done.
"Hey," He said in his accented, sharp voice, which made the T'vaoan female stop in her tracks, and it was the first time her amber, lizard-like eyes fell on his face. He smiled at her, and held out a candy bar for her, one of two that he had planned on eating. "You're look'n rough there, darlin'. Wanna' bite?"
Kuhaga hired her when he found them in a lucra-bar in the lower decks of the habitat. Kel and he had chatted for hours, and subsequently discovered several booth-games with holoscreens that were worth playing. They were currently gathering crowds as they both were unable to beat each other's scores at marksmanship simulators. On the edges of the crowds, a small band of seven other T'vaoans lingered, trying to hide blamite blades in their belts. They were still cursing and hewing as more and more of Kuhaga's men came over and inadvertently spooked them. They never got Kel.
Kel looked younger than, even though it had only been barely over a year. The jobs since her induction into a band of mostly human contractors had aged her. She had seen and done things that had changed her persona forever.
Talner missed the small amount of innocence left in her eyes. The saurian, toothy grin down her beak as she straddled the mount-chair for the booth beside him, clicking the plastic triggers and blowing away legions of holographic, undead horrors lumbering ever closer to the undefeatable pair.
Blue lights from the illumination of the lucra-bar. Kel had looked like a skull-faced, azure creature. Her back had been arched, her pert, black chest and feathery plumage presented, catching the blue beams from the screen and fixtures overhead, her eyes contrasting it all in healthy shades of gold.
Talner never admitted the fascination he had with her body to anyone, except Kel, but never outright. He had a feeling she knew.
Kel Yn Gor, for her part, was staring at him as they stood silently on the top of the dune. Her inhuman snout was unreadable to him, but the expression on her face was at least soft, and that much he knew.
"Has anyone ever told you that you are a freakin' amazing person?" He asked her finally.
The Kig-yar's physical appearance changed before his eyes. The strangest look bloomed all across her face and body. It was as if an invisible, very cool breeze was caressing the reptilian, touching her, whispering revolutionary things to her.
Kel's eyes became very heavy and her feathers were quivering so fast, that they appeared as fluttering dragonfly wings over her head and shoulders. Talner wasn't thinking about anything he did. He knelt in the sand, and he dropped his gun on the dune. Her strangely sculpted claw was entwined with his fingers next, her hide calloused here, and rougher in comparison to the smooth, fleshiness that wrapped her soft, hunched body and her legs.
Her legs.
Talner's hips became warm. Kel chattered a sound that mimicked the pleased trill of a small house-bird. The Kig-yar bent her snout down, and soon, her forehead merged with his in a quaint tap of skin.
Talner blinked as he felt desert-wind licking his hair. His eye darted down beside his knee, where his helmet's blue visor stared back up at him silently.
He hadn't even realized that one of them had taken it off.
"Not in that kind of way before, no." Kel chuckled through her teeth, shutting her eyes as the full weight of his own accent hit her.
He certainly wasn't a poet, and she didn't totally get the idiom around freakin', but she got the point.
"'Bout high time, then." He muttered, rubbing his hand down her lithe, black arm, teasing the feathers at the rear-shoulder-blade between his fingers. He made her croon quietly and she pressed the tip of her snout into his chin, taking in his scent with a heavy huff. "It's been long enough, to answer your question."
"If you have an answer for that one, then you must too for my next one." She pulled back a little and lowered her gaze. "Talner… I want-"
Bmmmmmmmm~…
-Both of them whipped their heads back towards from where they had come.
Their eyes followed the gradually vanishing duo of footsteps they'd left in the sand, one path the rounded heels of a hominid, the other, a barbed pattern of claw-prints. Up and past the rise of a few dunes, they could see the blooming edge of a fiery mushroom cloud's iris.
Something at the digsite had exploded.
"Holy shit." Talner jolted to his feet and picked up his helmet and gun. "Hello? Talner to Tower, hello? What's happening over there?" He rambled as soon as he got the helm over his head, clicking the comm bead repeatedly.
"That was an internal explosion." Kel gracefully strode over to a sharp series of boulders and hopped several feet to perch on the tallest spire in the formation. She shouldered her rifle and leaned close, scrutinizing the distant, evaporating plume. "One of the burn tanks must have finally ignited. Or someone was a complete idiot and set it off by accident."
"How the hell did that cloud reach the top of the trench like that? The entire digsite's gotta' be a crater from that kind of force." Talner switched off his rifle and punched his helmet's bead again. "Nobody's answering."
"Look." Kel pointed at the cloud. As it was dissipating, the ghost of the plume was colored a faint greenish-yellow, almost sickly in its shade. "It's being fed by ore-plasma. It was most definitely a tank. That does not equal force."
"At least we can hope." Talner grunted. "Damn us if that took out any of the ships at the Tower. Those things are our only way off this rock."
"-only air asset call-in- ackie, maki- ques- to tak-" –A broken garble hissed in Talner's feed.
"Link this." He pointed at Kel, and she scrambled down from her perch, clicking a small rune on the collar of her harness to join the feed. "Who is this? You're breaking up. Confirm."
"-alner-? –Th- ackie- taki –ight path towards your position. I say again, this is Shackie, me and my team are flying towards you. The digsite's had an accident, and Tower's scans have a UFO in our vicinity. Do you hear me? We're consolidating. The operation's done. We're pulling out."
Talner and Kel shared looks. Neither could really read the other in that moment. Was it apprehension, relief or fear? Probably some strange hybrid of all three.
"Shackie, we're about one-point-six kilometers south of the Tower, heading from the mouth of the landing valley. We're beside a boulder formation, copy?" Talner voxed.
"High-ho, Talner, I copy. For a second, I thought the damned sand swallowed you or something. I am inbound, hold your position."
"The scans have detected a contact?" Kel parroted as they both took off from the link. "If it is a ship-"
"Let's hope to shit it ain't." He shook his head. "Watch the horizon, we gotta' make sure whoever flies over our heads is on our side."
The once peaceful dunes now seemed rife with menace. Both sharpshooters nodded to one another, and Talner gestured for her to take the north. He immediately tossed himself to his belly in the sand and clicked a few adjustments into his scope. He hunkered behind a rock ridge and scanned the skies, his heart pounding in his chest.
With limited effectiveness, his gun could take out a lightly armored airborne vehicle if the shot was precise enough and in the right place. But that was assuming the unidentified craft- if it even was a craft –was something like a Banshee, or a Hornet or similar VTOL. Something told him that if it was just one contact, the likelihood of it being something bigger was higher.
He glanced over his shoulder to see Kel on the other side of the rocks. She was behind a boulder, still as a statue, with her gun craned over the rock's lip towards the north. She truly displayed her skill at the art even just by going through the routines. A tiny reminder of his prior experience with her still lingered. Their words for each other would have to wait.
Eventually, the pitter-patter thrumming of propellers echoed in the distance.
"Contact." Kel's voice hissed in his comm-bead.
Talner rose to a kneel and sighted down the north with his scope. The eagle-shaped nose of Shackie's Rotary Lifter met him in the tiny bubble. The craft veering to the west as it circled their position. He could see Shackie's outline in the cockpit. He was waving.
"-I see you, Talner. I'm coming in for a landing, join the lads. And bring your bird too."
The link gave off static as Kel huffed. Talner jogged through the sand and she just strode over it as the Rotary Lifter screamed down to ground level twenty or so feet away, kicking up a translucent tornado of dancing sand devils about its belly and flank. Its open bay was stuffed.
Two mercs wearing armor-pad suits similar to his were standing in the center, grasping roof-handles as the craft settled into a hover. A pair of Kig-yar and two other humans from Kuhaga's crew sat in the jumpseats, all of them looking straight at the two wanderers.
"Get in~!" –One of Tollen's men faintly roared over the blades. Talner and Kel ducked under the rotary spins and he stopped to let her leap in first before joining her.
"Everyone settled back there?" Talner gripped a roof rail with Kel, and Shackie's voice echoed in his helmet.
"We're in, Shackie, get us back to the digsite." Talner voxed, exchanging a look with Tollen's soldiers who were eyeing the three Kig-yar in the bay with distaste.
"This is gonna' get rough. I'm throttling it, so hold the hell on."
Kel had boarded way too many ships in her cross-piracy mercenary career to be afraid of some fancy flying maneuvers, and he was a former Helljumper. Shackie was trying to reassure a group of invincibles to G-force-fear.
The Rotary Lifter roared as it lifted straight up into the desert sky, the dry terrain below shrinking until the rocks that he and Kel had been sheltered around appeared small, and holdable in the palm of his hand. Wind rushed through the bay and one of the human contractors stumbled in his seat.
"Christ, Shackie, I didn't think you were serious." He dumbly shouted into his mic. "My balls just got slurped up my ass."
"Welcome to the Desert Hellhole Skyway. We hope you enjoy your fuckin' flight." Shackie cackled and everyone lurched as the craft nosed north. "Now all of you shut up. I'm trying to get a link to Tower. Susie' ain't answering."
"They're all dead, Shack'." One of Tollen's mercs shook his head. "That explosion was total. You're talking to air."
"The explosion was from ore-plasma." Talner rebuked into the link. "It was following the air-flow out of the trench. It didn't necessarily wipe out the entire dig. Keep trying, Shackie."
"Tower, come in tower." Shackie repeated again and again. The desert swept below them as they covered what short distance remained. Soon, the teeth marking the Crag Belt's top rim became visible. It was just a few minutes flight time away.
"-Shackie, this is Tower." It was the voice of Chelsea, one of the comm techs in the Tower base. "Come in."
"There's somebody." Shackie sighed. "Wing to Tower, I got all souls aboard and am hot for the digsite. Mind telling us what the hell happened?"
"Shackie, break off course now!" Susanne barked into the link. "The unidentified blip just rocketed over the Dassel Plains, just south of you. It's locked in on you and is closing rapidly. Adjust path! Break!"
"Jesus H. Christ." Shackie sounded like he was merely rolling his eyes in mockery of the statement, but then the Rotary Lifter ripped to the west and rapidly began to lose altitude. Tollen's mercs cursed and knelt in the bay. Talner protectively lashed out an arm and wrapped it around Kel's midsection, making the T'vaoan wince through the wind whipping over her beak to stare up at him as she held on for dear life.
Shackie swept the Lifter lower and the wind howled. Sand dunes passed right underneath the belly of the craft and soon gave way for a sheer drop of rocky cliffs.
"Yeah, boys and girls, we are going down in that. Just hang on. I'll lose them."
Tg-66 was riddled with thousands of deep trenches just like Crag Belt. Shackie dipped the Rotary Lifter past the cliff face and into the darker space between this new, unnamed trench's ribs. Towering basalt spires layered up from the darkness below, and Shackie had to swerve left and right in agonizingly slow weaves to dodge the rocks.
"Tight fit down here." He breathed.
"You idiot! You're gonna' get us killed!" The same soldier who had been complaining about his nuts barked as he clawed his seat, his eyes bugging as a basalt spire passed hideously close to the spinning edges of the left propeller. "Just stop the damn thing and hide behind some of the stacks!"
"Shackie, that thing is following you. It's in the trench." Susanne said over the link. "I think you're losing it though, it's weaving, looks confused."
"No doubts about it being a darned ship then." Talner called. "Susanne, not that this is a grand ole' time for this, but ya' mind explaining what the hell happened over there?"
"Burn tank rupture. Multiple casualties. Kuhaga and Tollen are evacuating the op." Susanne sounded like she was withholding something. Still, Kel scoffed through her beak.
"Was one of the casualties that cunt of an engineer and his toady?" She asked.
Talner was too engrossed in Shackie's weaving to laugh at her use of the curse word. A heightened sense of dread was building coldly in his guts about the other presence in the basalt stacks with them. Another thing was out here with them, and it had followed them. The Rotary Lifter wasn't armed, and that made him terrified. No amount of combat experience ever got rid of that assurance in a soldier's life. Fear was very real and always would be at his or her side until the end.
"Just one last stack pile." Shackie voxed, and the craft weaved one last time. "Shit, now that was some good flying. I think we lost it."
Suddenly, the air whooshed and Shackie cursed. The Rotary Lifter jolted backward and the afterburners kicked orange fire, nearly throwing everyone in the bay forward.
Talner gripped the hold over his head until his fingers were white and numb. He leaned out the bay's flank, risking the insurmountable blackness below his chin. His eyes went wide as a fat, glistening, metallic thing shot out from the space right underneath their bird and hovered menacingly just overhead the cockpit's level.
It was a bulky spaceship, three times their size, wreathed in reflective chrome, red and yellow colored synthetic metal. It wreaked of alien architecture and left its identity not wanting.
Emblazoned across the bulbous, porpoise-like nose of the serpentine ship's fuselage was a glowing gold sigil of a split-mandible skull run through with a crimson blood drop.
It was the sigil of the Sangheilian Clan of R'ha. A double-mouthed plasma cannon mounted on the Dromon-Class Dropship's chin swiveled up to point right at them.
"Jesus H. Christ." Shackie said again. The Rotary Lifter screamed and the bay's occupants felt their guts slam into their boots. Up they went, and a hissing stream of blue plasma bolts whistled in a near glance just below the Lifter's belly. As the sky rapidly descended to meet them, Talner- swinging in his position from the ceiling grip –looked down at the shrinking trench to see the Dromon rising up and giving chase.
"Shackie, she's on us." He blinked.
"Sangheili." Kel spat, gripping Talner's arm and squeezing.
"Tell me Huan's on the boomer." Shackie voxed as he gunned the Lifter for the digsite again. The Dromon's repulsors warbled loudly almost in mimicry to the cry of a descending, alien, predatory bird behind them. Shackie banked left and a blast of searing plasma whisked past the Lifter's ribs.
"I'm gonna' puke, man~!" The nut-guy hollered. "-And I'm too young to die like this!"
"Huan's on the boomer." Susanne voxed. "Damnit, that thing is fast."
"You're telling me." Shackie grunted and gunned the afterburners again.
Behind them, the Dromon was steadily keeping pace. It loudly droned through the desert sky, whipping over the dunes despite its fat bulk.
The eel-like ship was a design unique to the R'ha, tracing its lineage back to the ancient age of technology predating the formation of the Covenant, when the Sangheili were first settling their core worlds.
It spoke of its time thousands of years later with grace and agility. Dromons were capable, if not limited only by their lack of troop space. But just because the bird was old did not mean it would not kill them. Their only hope in the Lifter was to run.
"Susanne, what's the status of the rest of the digsite?" Talner asked as he glanced back at the pursuing ship. There was a long moment of merely static, and even Shackie was listening in without interruption. "Susanne?"
"The burn tanks breached Alpha Chamber." She crackled.
"And?"
"We were digging into a catacomb complex. It's been completely ripped open." Nobody in the bay spoke, and then, to capitalize the audacity of what was happening, Susanne added: "-There was a security monitor on one of the tombs."
Nearby, Kel chuckled sourly under her breath.
"I am surrounded by fools." She uttered.
"Tg-66 is a burial world." Talner laughed, hanging his head. "And we didn't even see that comin'."
Bang~! –one of the Rotary Lifter's wings vanished in a blast of fire, shrapnel and soot. Kel screeched as she was nearly ripped from the bay. Talner hooked an arm over her ribs and caught her. One of Kuhaga's contractors was not so lucky. The Kig-yar was sucked out in a wind current with a muted squawk. He flipped end over end once and vanished past the tailfin.
"Yeah. I'm going down." Shackie beautifully punctuated the scene with his nonchalant quips. The Lifter spun clockwise and whipped all the bay's occupants to the west. One of Tollen's men screamed as the G-force yanked him so hard from the roof-latch that it dislocated his arm, broke all his fingers and sucked him through the bay's leftwards space. He hit the still active rotary propeller and vanished in a fine crimson mist to mix with the soot trailing above them.
Talner felt his legs lift off the plating and he hung onto the latch over his head with all his might. Swinging once, twice, three times. Over and over the desert outside whipped by in a vertigo-inducing pass. Kel was screaming. He hugged her smaller form to his body and held her there. He would not let go.
No matter what, he would not let go.
{👾}