115: The Daughters of Ceto – Six
The Pelekys and the Gorgon, black and white mirrors of one another as they sat landed side by side on some desolate world. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but rolling dunes of yellowy orange sand, save for the pale blue sky above it all. The only feature was the flat surface that the two ships had landed on, the same colour as the desert surrounding it, but artificially flat and smooth, a hatch in the centre of it that was slowly irising shut.
Darkness. The sounds of many footsteps on metal the only thing to be heard. Eventually a dim glow bloomed in the distance, threading light along the steps and railings of a spiral walkway, and those descending it.
The crew of the Pelekys.
They eventually emerged out of the claustrophobic tube of the stairwell and into a wider hall lined with doors, lit by a strip of pale yellow light that ran along the floor. The architecture of the place was clean and bare, nothing to give away who had built it, or why. All the doors were nothing more than featureless indents in the walls, no obvious signs on how they could be opened, as they all remained firmly closed as the crew of the Pelekys passed them by, their footsteps oddly muffled as they traversed the hall, following the light on the floor.
It led them to a four way juncture, the strip of light following off down the left path, the other options left dark. And so the crew of the Pelekys went left.
It didn't take them long to reach the end of this hallway, a large door spanning the width of it. This one opened as they approached, leading them into a more brightly lit room.
Screens dominated this space. Large ones that were mounted across the walls, smaller ones set up at personal stations, pillars of them at the far back of the room, and a large tabletop one that the crew of the Gorgon were already standing around.
"This facility is quite secure," Kaizoku said by way of a greeting, her mechanical eye flashing in its socket, "I can then presume the target we are bound for is quiet important, if you would rather discuss the details of it here rather than invite us aboard your ship to go over the matter when we first made contact."
"We haven't lasted this long by being frivolous with who we invite aboard our ship," Stheno replied, "We had to make sure you were as good as your word."
To her left, Ladon let out a huff of a laugh as they said, "Needed the time to speak with Captain Naginata, what? Had a lovely chat with her and her crew, and she left quite the glowing review. Had she said anything but, we would have blown you out of the atmosphere before you made landfall."
"Then I suppose those mines placed around our landing site are just decorative?" Grim demanded, her mandibles twitching in agitation.
"A precaution," Enyo corrected, "And a means to ensure you'll be on your best behaviour."
Queen Kaizoku let her gaze sweep across the crew of the Gorgon, a slight smirk tugging at her lips as she began to walk around the table. "As you said, caution has been the source of your longevity. Were our positions reversed, I would doubtlessly have trapped your own landing pad. The word of another will only go so far in keeping us in your good graces, and so we shall have to prove ourselves women of our word. The target you are after, Enlightened as it is, means it is no doubt highly defended. You spoke of how they hoard Hyttan mechs for their own use, so one can assume that there will be a mechanized enemy force present for your operation. Military, then, for a civilian target would not require this much firepower to surmount."
She came to a stop in front of Stheno, hands clasped behind her back, and though the other woman was physically taller than her, Kaizoku was still able to stare her down as she added, "Your enemies are as secretive as you, as you would have doubtlessly launched an assault on your target already, had you known its location. This leads me to believe you plan to strike some sort of military outpost in deep space, and I highly doubt its of Bernetigan make."
"More or less." Stheno agreed, waving a hand over the tabletop screen.
Arranged around it as they were, the crews of the Gorgon and Pelekys were lit from below as the screen turned on. As obscured by their armour as always, the reactions of those of the Gorgon were kept hidden, but the members of the Pelekys had their own reactions on full display.
Augury's glowing eyes narrowed within the confines of her helmet and hood, while the Hand's tail lashed violently, just once. Grim's mandibles flickered in recognition, while the Knight crossed her arms beside her.
Leaning a hand against the table to shoot a look across it to her Queen, Bathory asked, "Well, this is a station that doesn't need to be clogging up our airspace, now is it?"
"It most certainly is not," Kaizoku agreed as she stared down at whatever was displayed across the tabletop screen, a sinister smile lighting up her features, "The sooner it is no more, the better."
"For more than just ourselves," Euryale said, her gaze fixed upon the information before her, "Removing this blight from the galaxy will allow countless others to rest at ease. I'm sure you can understand the security we've employed thus far."
Grim let out a harsh laugh at that. "I'd mine my allies too, if this was the prize I was after."
Next to her, the Knight of the Tomb glared across the table to Stheno as she asked, "When do we strike?"
"Soon," the Gorgon's captain told her, waving her hand across the screen once more, bringing up more information, "The assault will begin here..."
An operation the size of the one planned against the Mercatus meant that it had a lot of moving parts, and all those involved were taking full advantage of the time between now and when the mission would actually commence in order to prepare for it.
For the crew of the Pelekys, this ended up including a lot of networking.
Newcomers as they were to the Kith scene, they had a lot of catching up to do to familiarize themselves with those who had made their careers out of thwarting the Thalatte in whatever ways they could. The Gorgon were hardly the only crew to do so, after all, and most of the ones the Pelekys met had been going at it longer than a Galactic Standard century. The Pelekys would need to know how they all operated if they were going to find their own niche in the battle to come.
On top of all the networking, there were strategy meetings aplenty. Even with the reduced number of enemy forces that would be present at the Mercatus when they hit it, the Kith contingent was going to be at a disadvantage. Even with the nepotism choking their ranks, the Thalatte navy was still the finest in the galaxy, its members highly trained and highly disciplined. When the Thalatte fought, they fought as one, and it was rare for them to devolve into chaos. The Kith, on the other hand, were the definition of "ragtag", from their training to their equipment. Most Kith ships operated solo, rather than the organized fleets of the Thalatte, and so were better at more guerilla tactics than the Thalatte's iron clad unity. If they weren't careful, the Thalatte would have no problem organizing into squadrons and bringing the Kith down cleanly and methodically.
It had happened before, on more than enough occasions to keep the Kith of the Void from becoming a big enough threat to the Thalatte Stratocracy for them to actually put a dedicated effort into hunting them down.
There were going to be consequences to this mission against the Mercatus, whether it proved to be a success or a failure. When the Quintana and the Circumforanus were destroyed, the Thalatte navy had combed the galaxy for any of the Kith ships involved, putting out bounties to tempt the rest of galactic society into joining the hunt. Those desperate enough for the cash had answered the call, and for years after each station fell, Kith crews were under constant threat. The Quanvengier and its support fleet were forced to fly deeper into the core than they normally would, all to try and keep clear of the near constant raiding parties that were sent out to find them, and it was only their protective plating of Leviathan parts that allowed them to stay out of harm's way so thoroughly.
("Yeah, that was another thing," Rhea had brought up during one of the dinners that the crews of the Gorgon and Pelekys had ended up having with one another, ever since the family reunion, "The Leviathan were made by the Omega, so they're like its fucked up demigod babies, or something. That's why they don't seem to make any kind of biological sense, cuz they're built off of some other blueprint.")
But despite the greater threat that Thalatte were soon going to make of themselves when it came to how they dealt with the Kith, there wasn't a crew within the organization that was against this upcoming attack. Even beyond those who had been enslaved by the Thalatte, or lost loved ones to them, to the Kith of the Void, the Thalatte Stratocracy stood in direct opposition to everything they held dear. Uniformity over self actualization, conquest over cooperation, subjugation over freedom, the Thalatte were everything that the Kith weren't. They had to bring the Mercatus down on principle alone.
In preparation for the more aggressive attention they would soon be subjected to, Kith crews were heading out to harvest more Leviathan to provide extra armour for the Kith's main fleet, the Pelekys among them. Storlayacas' contributions of over a dozen assorted Threat Level Orange, and the only Yellow anyone had been able to track down in the allotted time - a Lambda, a massive brute with way too many legs, all of them jutting out of a shell that would make sizeable plating for some lucky ship - was accepted with much applause, both for the quantity and the speed with which they were brought in.
This left precious little time for the crews of the Pelekys and the Gorgon to mingle beyond grabbing a quick bite and catching up between missions the closer it came to the assault on the Mercatus itself, as their skill sets often had them on opposite sides of the galaxy from one another. But when the attack on the Mercatus was only days away from launching, the two ships managed to dock on the Quanvengier long enough for the Marinos triplets to make good on their threat of kidnapping Malakh for their own nefarious ends.
Willingly trapped between the three of them as they strolled down one of the commercial districts in the Quanvengier, beverages in hand, Malakh asked, "So is an obsession with coffee a human thing, or a Marinos thing?"
Selene made a noncommittal hum in the back of her throat before she said, "Kinda both? We got hooked on the stuff young - a lot of people do - but there are tons of humans who can't stand it."
"Yeah, I can see how it would be an acquired taste," Malakh said with a laugh, taking a sip from her own iced coffee, "It's an overpowering flavour."
"I used to rag on Rhea for drinking so much during university," Phoebe said with a fond laugh, idly swirling her cortado, "I swear, she drank enough of that shit to permanently alter her DNA."
"She's growing her own now so she can have it fresh," Malakh told her, "She swears that the fabricator stuff isn't anywhere near as good."
"Well it isn't!" Leto scoffed, "A plant or a food animal, it's more than just the molecules that they're made of. What was in the soil it grew it, the water it drank, the air it breathed, or the quality of light it received? What nutrients did it absorb while it was alive? All of that colours - flavours - a food, and that's not something the fabricators can, well, fabricate! It'll do to live off of, but only if you supplement the shit out of it with things that were actually grown. Our hydroponics garden is the only reason I can stomach fabricator food."
Malakh couldn't keep the grin off her face as she said, "A hydroponics bay was something Rhea insisted on when we upgraded the Pelekys."
"Not shocking," Selene said with a grin of her own, "We grew up with a herb garden, and that was one of the first things we got installed on the Gorgon when we went Kith."
"Oh, that reminds me," Leto said suddenly, pulling a data pad out of her jacket as a devious little smile curled her lips, "I have embarrassing images and videos of Rhea as a kid that I think you'll find highly enjoyable."
"I will gladly take them," Malakh told her, her own smile falling slightly as she pulled her own data pad out to facilitate the transfer, "I don't have any I can give her in return, I just realized. Nothing from my childhood survived."
Her own expression falling, Phoebe reached out to lay a hand across her shoulders, saying, "I'm sorry. What happened, if you don't mind me asking?"
Blowing out a sigh, Malakh told her, "The Thalatte happened. I grew up on Emerl, a colony world on the edge of Deorviran space, and it got invaded when I was young. Lost my parents, lost the rest of my blood kin, and I ended up running with a gang of other orphaned cubs until I was midway through my teens. We stole a ship to try and make it to the homeworld, but we got caught, and anyone who wasn't immediately killed was conscripted. I was processed through Mercatus."
"Well, you're going to be there for its downfall." Selene replied softly, bumping into her gently.
Knocking into her shoulder back, Malakh said, "I'm very looking forward to that. That place is-"
The four of them came to an abrupt halt as two thalatte stepped into their path, the both of them in the uniforms of quartermasters, one of them asking, "Malakh’kharismaewer of the Pelekys?"
Hearing a thalatte actually get her full name right was a shock, as the ones she'd been enslaved to had never put in the effort to learn more than just the shortened version they'd shackled her with. As such, there was an uncomfortable pause before she said, "That's me. Is something the matter?"
The other thalatte made a rattling hum in their chest before saying, "There's been an incident. If you would follow us? It isn't a matter that should be discussed in public."
The edge of Lochagos Stheno bleeding into her voice as she straightened to her full height, Phoebe said, "We're accompanying her."
The first thalatte quartermaster gave a curt nod, already turning as they said, "Good, as the matter concerns the lot of you, too."
The four of them shared a dire look, hastily downing the remainders of their drinks before stepping in behind the two quartermasters, following them as they were led to a private shuttle just around the corner.
No sooner were the four of them seated than the thalatte driving had them pulled into one of the transport corridors that ran throughout the Quanvengier, and Selene asked, "Can you give us more information now?"
"You'll understand when we get there," the other quartermaster told her, "It won't be more than a few minutes."
Despite that, it did not settle the nerves of the passengers any, the four of them regretting the coffee now surging through their veins.
But sure enough, a few minutes later, the shuttle settled in front of a ostentatious building, the lines of it Thalatte beneath the Kith splendour adorning it. Stepping out of the shuttle, the pilot motioned to the triplets and said, "Please follow the other officer. You're with me."
In response to the claw levelled at her, Malakh demanded, "What's going on?"
"You'll see inside." The quartermaster said, stepping up to the small flight of stairs that led to the entrance of the building. Malakh shot the triplets a worried look before hurrying after the quartermaster.
The foyer inside had the angular tracery of the Thalatte architecture that Malakh had been subjected to throughout the course of her conscription, but there was an ornate elegance to it that the military structures she was more familiar with had lacked. As unsettled as she was, Malakh couldn't help but be struck by the beauty of it. A reminder that the Thalatte could be more than the brutality that their military demanded.
It was only a short walk through a side hall before the quartermaster led her out into a wider room, the walls decorated with murals depicting some of the rolling, rural landscapes of Lutiya's past, illuminated by the warm light coming from lamps set along the walls of the space, all of them flickering with artificial candlelight. The circular room had no chairs, and so the crowd within it, nearly fifty people, were clustered around the perimeter. All of them were thalatte, Sara of the Gorgon standing alone in the centre of the room, hands clasped behind their back, and a serious expression on their face.
"Malakh’kharismaewer of the Pelekys," Sara intoned as the quartermaster motioned her forward, "A serious charge has been levelled against you."
Her turn to be flabbergasted, Malakh demanded, "What's going on here? What charge!?"
Sara turned their head to one side, to the voice that rang out above the crowd, "The charge is that you're in love with me."
Malakh had fully turned to face her vedja before Rhea had finished speaking, watching as she stepped out from the crowd, her serious expression marred by the mirth sparkling in her eyes.
As Malakh could do nothing but gape at Rhea, Sara said, "As I said, a serious charge. Do you deny it?"
"What!?"
"Are you in love with her?"
"Of course I am!" Malakh growled, eyes darting between Rhea and Sara, who shared a knowing smile at that.
"A reciprocal charge then!" Sara bellowed, "Are there kin or clade who would witness the carrying out of the sentence?"
"We stand as Malakh’kharismaewer's clade." Pryseia's voice rang out from the crowd, and Malakh turned to see her, along with Nevara, Elytra, V'tala, and Viatrix in her iridescent gold vacation drone stepping up to stand at her back.
"We stand as Rhea Samira Marinos' clade and kin." Ravona called out as she and Yarvela emerged from those gathered, a bewildered Phoebe, Selene, and Leto between them.
"Then let the accused step forward." Sara motioned towards Rhea and Malakh, an elaborately decorated strip of cloth in one hand.
Stepping up next to Rhea, Malakh hissed, "What is going on?!"
Reaching out to take both of Malakh's hands in her own, Rhea said, eyes bright, "Payback for the stunt you pulled on Osatiawjo. It's my turn to pull a surprise wedding."
Malakh couldn't help the bewildered laugh that burst out of her as Sara stepped up to them, the humour evident in their voice as they whispered, "A brilliant insult on the eve of our assault, what? The two of you getting hitched Thalatte style right before we blow one of their slave processing stations to smithereens!"
"Besides, my sisters didn't get a chance to attend any of our other weddings, so I couldn't not have another one, now that we've been reunited." Rhea added with a wink.
Everything she wanted to say was caught in her throat with the tears she was trying to fight back, Malakh's heart aching in her chest for the woman before her. She barely heard the ceremonial words that Sara spoke as they wrapped the cloth around their joined hands, could hardly pay attention to the cheers of her crew - her family - as she and Rhea were once again pronounced as wives. The salt of Rhea's joyous tears and the shape of her smile as she kissed her were all Malakh could focus on, and she knew, even without the dire threat of the Omega looming just beyond their horizon, that they were walking away from their assault on the Mercatus alive.
The love she had for her wife - her vedja - wouldn't allow anything else to happen.