112: The Daughters of Ceto – Three
"Hey," Rhea called out as she entered the Pelekys, sisters in tow, "I brought company."
Her avatar popping onto the closest screen as the four of them entered through one of the personnel ramps, Viatrix greeted, "Hi! Nice to finally meet you!"
"So this is Vi, and this is Phoebe, Selene, and Leto." Rhea introduced them all, Viatrix giving a little spin while the humans waved.
"I'm in two places at once at the moment," Viatrix said with a little giggle, "Malakh and V'tala took me to a combat training place here, and we're just on our way back. V'tala let me fire her gun! It's got kick!"
"Seeing what it does to people, I'm not surprised!" Rhea laughed, "The others out too?"
"Elytra's holed up in her room with a bunch of media running, too in the weeds with that to respond when we asked if she wanted to tag along, and Pryseia and Nevara are in the mess hall just working on supper. You ladies wanna stay for that?" Viatrix asked.
"Only if you all swing by the Gorgon for breakfast," Leto said, "We should probably start figuring out logistics for our joint operation."
Viatrix avatar gave a little bob as she said, "Oof, yeah, we really should. I'll let everyone know!"
And with that, her avatar vanished.
"She's cute." Selene laughed, "Absolutely nothing like the grimdark design of your ship!"
"Yeah, the exterior we didn't really have a choice on, but we went a little overboard with the melodramatic look of the inside," Rhea admitted with a laugh of her own as she ran a hand along one of the now permanent Gothic panels, "And our characters, for that matter."
Bumping into her side, Phoebe said, "Oh we did to, got this whole kind of antihero thing going on with them and all. It's a pretty common trope among Kith characters."
"Probably because it's easier to justify all the criminal shit we need to do to survive." Leto pointed out with a shrug.
"Also helps when we've got someone on our crew verbose enough to be a super villain," Rhea said fondly as she pointed at Pryseia, now that they'd made it to the mess hall.
Pryseia huffed at that, gesturing at them with the knife she was using to dice vegetables as she said, "This sentiment keeps being repeated at my person, an accusation as baseless as it is preposterous!"
Smirking at her, Nevara quipped, "She said, brandishing a knife at our guests."
Pryseia just shot her a look at that, turning back to Rhea and her sisters. "Dinner still requires preparation, so you've time enough for a tour."
Nodding, Rhea said, "I told them about all the Hyttan stuff we got mixed up in, so I'm taking them to meet the Storlayacas."
Letting out a thoughtful hum, Pryseia mused, "I will admit, I had been wondering if they could be… heard by others beyond ourselves."
"Well we'll find out now." Rhea said just as cryptically as she and her sisters passed from the mess hall to their armoury.
"Heard?" Phoebe repeated, "These things really are alive?"
"There's definitely some kind of intelligence in there," Rhea agreed, "Now we'll see how communicative they are with people who aren't us."
Stepping onto the chartreuse demat zone had them in the cargo hold a moment later, and the triplets all came to a sudden halt, brought up short by the overwhelming presence of the Storlayacas units standing at rest.
"Holy shit," Leto breathed, "They're a lot bigger than I expected."
"A lot more colourful too." Selene added, "Very not like Hyttan tech."
"Yeah, that's new," Rhea admitted as she brought them over to the access walkway, "They used to be the same pale grey as everything else Hyttan, but they all changed colour when they… woke up."
Once the four of them had made it to the top of the stairs, Rhea called out to the Storlayacas, "Hey all. This is Phoebe, Selene, and Leto - my older sisters. They're basically to me what you are to each other."
The sensation she felt coming off the Storlayacas units was like a manifestation of the sentiment of, "Oh!" followed by an excited welcome. Next to her, her sisters all flinched, looking stunned.
"That was not what I was expecting at all," Phoebe said, white-knuckling the railing, "It's like if a zymeth had a megaphone."
An apologetic wave rolled off the Storlayacas units, their presence pulling back like the tide.
"They're as new to all this as we are, so we're all figuring it out as we go," Rhea said fondly, turning to the mechs, "But this is Zaanlaa, Lianshae, Castore, Yarula, Malra, and Enaruli. We don't have the room for it in here, but together they - we - become Storlayacas."
"Hyttan tech really is something else," Leto said, her laugh disbelieving as she turned to the mechs, "Well, it's nice to meet you all."
They could all feel how pleased the Storlayacas units were by that.
"This is all coo coo bananas, right?" Leto said nearly an hour later, seated around the dining table with her sisters and the crew of the Pelekys, a spoonful of an apiarian dish that the humans swore was like something from their world called pad thai, "Mechs that are alive, the thing that killed the Hyttan is coming back, no one can understand anything about their tech because this whatever-the-fuck somehow deleted that ability from everything? It all sounds made up!"
Malakh snorted out a laugh at that. "Oh trust me, this being our lived truth? Doesn't make it any easier to believe."
"Honestly, the fact that you survived in stasis for a thousand years is the most believable part of this whole thing," Leto said with a gesture to V'tala before she turned to Rhea, "You can't do anything simple and easy, can you?"
"Where's the fun in that?" Rhea replied with a shrug.
Shaking her head, expression caught somewhere between fondness and disbelief, Phoebe told Rhea, "I'd always imagined, when we found and freed you, that you'd join up with the rest of us, but it's pretty clear that you've got your own path to follow out here. I wouldn't dream of taking you from this."
Reaching across the table to hold her hand, Rhea replied, "As if I'm not going to be calling you up all the time to be annoying now that I know you're out here. You can kiss your days of peace and quiet goodbye!"
Selene cackled at that, whacking Rhea on the arm as she said, "As if we had that working for the Kith and taking down Thalatte all the time! You'd be a welcome bit of chaos."
"Then I will be more than happy to provide." Rhea told her, her grin impossible to contain.
Phoebe, Selene, and Leto ended up staying well after supper, after Rhea broke out a bottle of wine she'd been saving for a special occasion. What was more special than discovering that the sisters she thought she'd lost to old age were alive and well, and space pirates the same as her?
Late as it was, tipsy as they were, when Malakh climbed into bed with her vedja, she fully expected that the both of them would be dead to the world in a matter of minutes.
And she was just about fully under when she felt Rhea loop an arm around her, a hand coming to rest over her heart, pulling her bodily against her chest. Malakh felt herself emerging from the fog of pre-sleep at that, a suggestive comment on the tip of her tongue, but then she felt Rhea take a rattling breath, pressing her forehead to the back of Malakh's skull, and she fully woke up, trying to twist in Rhea's hold as she asked, "What's wrong?"
But Rhea held fast, held tighter, shook her head where she pressed it against Malakh's as a sob tore through her. Pinned as she was, Malakh could only lace her fingers through the hand over her heart as she waited for Rhea to ride out whatever had overtaken her, her tail looping around her waist in a comforting hold.
It was several minutes before Rhea's grip on her loosened, and Malakh immediately rolled them over, Rhea throwing her hands over her face.
Braced against her chest, Malakh asked, "What's going on? And if you give me some bullshit about being fine, I'll bite you."
Beneath her hands, Rhea gasped out a broken laugh, though it was immediately choked off by a sudden sob. It took a few more minutes before Rhea got out, "It's not fair."
Malakh carded a hand through Rhea's hair as she waited for her wife to continue, a shudder ratcheting through her before she said, "Your and Elytra's families were killed, Nevara and Pryseia lost theirs to old age, V'tala was denied one from birth. Then there's me, getting my sisters back, and not only that, but they're Kith too? How the fuck is any of that fair!?"
"Baby," Malakh said softly, settling more firmly against Rhea as she gently pulled her hands away from her face, "You know as well as I do that nothing in this life is fair. Everyone's fighting tooth an claw to survive in this shit show, and most of them don't make it. We got lucky making it to this point. Your sisters got lucky making it to this point. If life was fair, you'd have never met me, because I would have had absolutely no reason to ever leave Emerl. We'd probably both be dead of old age by now, never knowing the other existed."
"Well that's a shitty fucking thought." Rhea said, tears freely flowing at that potentiality, and Malakh felt herself tearing up alongside her.
"I know, but I think it sometimes," Malakh said, "What my life would have been like if the Thalatte hadn't fucked it all up. I wouldn't have lost the people I grew up with, but I never would have gotten any of you. I wouldn't be waking up in your arms every morning. I can't imagine what my life would have been like, if it would have been better or worse than what I ended up getting, but despite every horrible thing that has happened to me, I can't imagine being happier than I am being yours. Nothing I can fantasize is better than that reality."
That got a more genuine laugh out of Rhea, though it was still thick with tears. "Fuck, I'm sorry. I think I was drunker than I thought."
"You did have a reason to celebrate," Malakh told her, cupping her cheeks with both hands so she could wipe away Rhea's tears with her thumbs, "And I'm so happy that the reason was because you and your sisters found each other. The odds of that happening are astronomically unlikely! I'm sure Viatrix could tell you exactly how impossible that should have been."
"Oh probably," Rhea said, taking another shuddering breath, "I just wish that the rest of you had the same chance to get your own families back, slim as mine was and all."
"That's one of the many things that I love about you," Malakh told her with a fond smile, "Just how deeply you care. Any crumb of happiness you get, and you want the same to befall everyone around you. Would that the universe were as kind as you are."
Placing a hand over one of Malakh's to hold it in place, Rhea tilted her head enough to kiss her palm before she murmured into it, "I'm sorry that there isn't anything I can do to bring any of your families back to you. I know I can't. I guess the booze just got me blindsided enough to have a bit of a breakdown about it."
"I know you'd bring them all back if you could," Malakh told her softly, her expression suddenly turning devious as she said, "But you know, since we're married and all, they're my sisters now too, so I guess you did bring me family, eh?"
"Well if you're going to get technical about it," Rhea said with a little laugh, before she pulled Malakh down for a brief kiss, "Thank you. I didn't expect to get this weepy over something that really is a miracle."
"I don't know about you, but given that the majority of our lives have been hell in a very literal sense, I sometimes find myself getting emotional over mundane niceties." Malakh told her, "So I'm not gonna hold this against you."
Something flirty coming back into her demeanour, Rhea asked, "Oh? Is there something that you would hold against me?"
Taking the bait with a smirk, Malakh said, "Yeah. Me."
And with that, she leaned down to pull her wife into a heated kiss.
The Gorgon had started out life as a Human vessel, but it had been modified over the years to better suit the kinds of dangerous situations that the Marinos triplets and their crew were wont to get into. The hull plating was of Deupazing make, built to take a hit, while the engines were Apiarian, made to tear through the stars at breakneck speeds. They'd managed to get their hands on a Zymeth stealth system, while the weapons were all of Thalatte origin.
As a nod to the myths they'd themed their ship and crew around, the Gorgon had been painted to look like it was carved from marble, as if the ship itself had been turned to stone by a Gorgon's stare. It was as austere as it was intimidating where it lay at rest in a berth within the Quanvengier, the sleek design of it similar enough to the Pelekys that the two ships could have been sisters - one of light, the other of shadow. Fitting, considering their crews.
That pale, stone aesthetic was carried over to the interior of the ship. Grecian columns were set between the fabricated panels of the interior, all of them made to look like carved bas-reliefs that could have been found in ancient Greek temples, only instead of scenes depicting the gods of old getting up to their customary drama, the ones aboard the Gorgon all depicted the exploits of its crew.
"Ravona outdid herself customizing these panels," Yarvela said as she and Sara led the crew of the Pelekys (Viatrix joining them in her Hyttan drone) through the halls of the Gorgon, "She was quite taken by pre-Kessendric mythology as a child, and the art style from that era is similar to the Human culture that the Marinos' went with for the look of their aesthetic. It's also similar to an ancient Thalatte art style, which is a fantastic point of unity, considering the makeup of our crew."
"It's the same for our own ship," Nevara said, "All of our people had a similar design aesthetic somewhere within one of the cultures that sprang from our homeworlds."
Sara made a barking, rattling laugh as they said, "There's a veritable cavalcade of coincidences like that across all our species, eh what? Different pronunciation, but apparently my own name has long been a Human name, well before they reached beyond their star! All these similarities, and the Enlightened think they're somehow better than the rest of the galaxy, for no other reason than they arrived early to the party? Absolutely preposterous!"
Huffing out a laugh of her own, Elytra said, "The rest of the galaxy really could learn a thing or two from the Kith. Like how working with others instead of against them can get you all that you want."
"And then some!" Sara agreed, "But fools are the last to realize, alas."
They arrived in the Gorgon's mess hall then, the spacious room filled with the enticing smells of something spiced being cooked up.
"Hey, good morning!" Leto called from where she was flipping something sizzling on a sizeable skillet, Ravona pulling a bubbling casserole out of the oven across from her, "Perfect timing, this is just about done."
With the fourteen of them there (Adyt, the Gorgon AI's avatar like a bright blue flame projecting into the room thanks to a holographic emitter that had been set up for her), breakfast was a boisterous affair, the two crews swapping stories as easily as they swapped platters of food. Despite the variety of races present, it felt more like a family gathering than it did two disparate crews buckling down for a meal. The conversations meandered as the plates were cleared, but soon enough they powered through all the food, and then they got down to work.
In the Gorgon's meeting room - clearly designed with filming in mind, as the circular space was built to look like a throne room for the Olympian gods - the organics gathered around the circular table in the middle of the room, the screen in the surface of it blinking on as Adyt brought up the pertinent information for their upcoming mission, Viatrix hovering above it all to get a bird's eye view.
"Our target is the Mercatus, the largest and most infamous of the Thalatte's slave processing centres." Phoebe said, bringing up a holographic model of the facility they were after to hover above the table. It looked like a bunch of boxes in assorted shapes and sized had been crammed together, each of their purposes impossible to tell from the look of their exteriors alone. "We've spent years trying to find this place, but Thalatte command has always been careful to keep this thing on the move."
"Wait, that's a station?!" Elytra interrupted, "It looks like a prefab apartment complex!?"
Shaking their head in disgust, Sara told her, "Modern design principles amongst the Thalatte prioritize function over form. Would that the architects from Lutiya's past could see what their successors have come up with, they would weep for how hideous it is, I'm sure."
"We'd honestly thought this place was on Lutiya itself, after all, what safer place to process ones slaves than on a heavily defended homeworld," Phoebe continued, "But no, despite the look of this thing, it's spaceworthy. And it's also due for a retrofit."
Bringing up an inventory list on the table, Ravona told them, "One of our contacts managed to catch a lucky break with a requisition order slated for the Mercatus, and learned that the place is being emptied of both slaves and personnel. In a few short weeks, there's only going to be a skeleton crew left to defend in while they wait for the upgrades to get installed."
Reaching across the table to bring up a different list, this one of ships in the Kith registry, Selene added, "We aren't the only ones who have a grudge against the Thalatte's conscripting ways. There are a bunch of other Kith crews out there tracking down where both those crews and slaves are going, and they'll deal with them accordingly when they find them. The Gorgon is part of the attack wave to bring the Mercatus down."
"We wish to be part of this wave as well," Pryseia said, speaking for her crew, "I know of the four of us who were taken by the Thalatte, we had our start in their service begin at Mercatus."
"I had a thought," Leto grit out, shooting Rhea a look, "If you'd have been taken anywhere, it would have been there."
"I never saw the outside of it. Never knew where it was," Rhea said as she leaned on her fist to get a better look at the place where her servitude had begun, "But my memories of that place are far from fond."
"In a few week's time, you'll have a much brighter memory of this place," Sara said, a savage glint in their eye, "After all, what's brighter than a massive explosion?"