140: First Worst Dread – One
No one knew how big the device that could track the Omega was - not any of the Storlayacas, and certainly none of the crew - they could only guess that it was most likely smaller than a planet, but even then, when combing the entirety of the galaxy for such a thing, even a planet was infinitesimal in comparison.
They decided to be methodical in their search, coming out of the currents of the core with the intent of taking a spiralling journey throughout the galaxy. By unanimous vote, they decided to leave Bernetigan space unexplored until, and only if, it became apparent that they weren't going to find what they were looking for in the rest of the galaxy. Even with the upgrades to their ship, and the incredible power of Storlayacas, none of them were eager to cross paths with a race that would be able to strip them of everything that they were with frightening ease. They could only hope that their search would turn up results elsewhere before Bernetigan space became their only choice.
The first week ended empty handed, as far as the Omega detector went, at least. With their search being as thorough as it was, they made sure to scan for other equipment they could incorporate into their ship, and ended up stumbling upon quite the find.
Nevara landed the Pelekys down on an uninhabited world near Baithaiz space, far enough off the beaten path that it hadn't been charted by anyone in the modern age. The midday sky on this nameless world was a pastel magenta, the grasses stretching out around them a soft teal, both a colourful contrast to the Hyttan colony they'd parked on the fringes of, the stark white of the buildings looking like they'd been grown out of the ground itself.
"It certainly doesn't look like it's older than all our races combined." Elytra's voice was quiet, reverent as she and the others stepped off the personnel ramp, dressed in their Kith armour and ready to film.
The gentle breeze that curled past them carried the distant scent of wildflowers, the atmosphere and what grew in it thankfully not harmful for any of them to breathe. In the distance, a herd of some deer-like creatures eyed them warily, their hides of dappled green and yellow, a single branching horn sprouting from each of their heads. They were curious enough to keep an eye on them as the crew of the Pelekys made their way towards the colony, but not so curious as to follow after.
Walking through the long abandoned Hyttan colony was an odd experience. The place was ancient enough that most of the structures were partially buried, eons of weather and plant growth having filled the walkways between buildings with dirt and grasses, the buildings not damaged enough to have stripped the debris away to mend themselves. If this place had once been paved, it was under a thick layer of dirt now. Yet despite the length of time these buildings had stood there devoid of sentient life, they were as spotless and pristine as if they'd just been dematted over from the factory that had built them.
Thankfully, this expedition to an ancient ruin panned out far less disastrous than their trip to Lichhaemleas, with no raiders with a grudge to attack them, and no emergency surgeries to perform. Malakh led them through the empty streets, scanner in hand, with half their time spent spouting ominous lines for the eventual video Elytra would edit out of all this, and the other half just shooting the breeze with one another. It was a beautiful day, after all, free from the perils that had plagued them as of late.
They came away from that colony with a shielding module (found in what they could only assume was a parts storage warehouse beside what was most likely a spaceport), and a handful of hydroponic pods ("Nice, I've been on the lookout for some of these!" Was Rhea's delighted cry as she hoisted one of the pods out of the container it had lain in for millennia, "Shock of shock, they're way more efficient than anything we have kicking around in the modern age. Perfect for fresh veggies! The fabricator salads just do not cut it for me anymore."). They also alerted the closest Baithaiz Hyttan research institute of the colony's location, and received a hefty finders fee in return.
"It pays to be nice, I suppose." Nevara had quipped over Pryseia's shoulder, the both of them grinning at the newest deposit to their account.
Week number two brought with it another abandoned colony, and a few more odds and ends they could integrate into the ship. The finders fee for locating the colony was nice, but not exactly something that would keep their audience entertained. For something a little more pulse pounding, they sought out Leviathan, but in this corner of space they only managed to come across a swarm of Alphas. The quantities and quality of these weaklings weren't enough to make them much of a threat, but Elytra spiced things up in the edit, enough to tide their fans over until they could find bigger prey.
Week three led to the discovery of a Hyttan ship parked on a moon tidally locked to a gas giant of banded orange and blue. The ship itself wasn't much bigger than the Pelekys, and looked all the world like it had just come to ground not long ago in order to take in the scenic view before it.
Inside, however, was a different matter.
Viatrix managed to get the airlock to the ship open without issue, the interior pressurized as the Hyttan's miraculous power source still had it running after all this time. Cool white lights blinked on once the the airlock repressurized and they stepped into the ship, the corridor stretching out to the fore and aft from where they stood. They split up to cover more ground, and it wasn't long before they found their first body.
"Well, it's not exactly a body," Rhea corrected herself, her voice coming to all of them over their Longan Units, "The armour's made of self healing material too, so whoever died in this thing was just broken down in order for the suit to maintain itself over the ages. That's the reason you generally don't find much in the way of anything aboard Hyttan vessels. Anything that isn't self healing, that is."
"Yeah, all the goods and the remains of the usgaisjans who'd been aboard it had been super brittle, already partially absorbed by the ship we found V'tala and Enaruli in," was Malakh's grim addition, "From what research has been able to gather about how the self healing tech works, it goes for organic matter before it goes for inorganic when pulling in raw material."
"Meaning that if that ship had remained hidden indefinitely, my stasis pod would have been eventually eaten away, and me along with it?" V'tala replied, a humourless laugh escaping her as she added, "That's oddly comforting, to know I wouldn't have been trapped in stasis until the end of time."
The ship ended up being a bust in terms of anything worthwhile they could pull from it for their own use, none of the armour of the crew of that vessel able to fit the living members of the Pelekys, all of the systems and whatnot aboard it anything new they could add or better than what they already had back home. But still, they received a salvage bounty for turning it over to the Kith, and some lucky crew out there would have the chance to have their very own Hyttan vessel in short order.
With week four came the discovery of what was very likely a Hyttan listening outpost just beyond Zymeth space, one that had been picked over by scavengers already. But a reading that there was another Hyttan ship nearby led them to a door that was cleverly hidden behind a unassuming stretch of wall, Viatrix easily able to get it open, leading to a small hangar with room enough for only a small ship, much smaller than the Thalatte shuttle they had back aboard the Pelekys.
"I don't believe all of us will fit within at the same time," Nevara said, running a hand across the exterior of the ship, "It looks to be more of a personal vehicle than a means of transporting goods."
"We've more than room enough in our cargo hold for this thing, why not take it as a prize?" Pryseia suggested, the grin audible in her voice even if it was hidden behind the featureless expanse of Queen Kaizoku's helmet.
And so it was that the small craft found a home aboard the Pelekys.
Like most Hyttan vehicles, the controls of the craft were easy to use, Nevara having no trouble flying it back to the Pelekys after Viatrix found the airlock to that tiny hangar. The interior of their new ship was cramped, with room enough for just a pilot and a single passenger to fit in comfortably (or in Rhea's case, uncomfortably, the ship clearly not designed for a person of her stature or powerful build), but what the ship lacked in space, it more than made up for with speed.
Finding an asteroid field took no time at all, and Nevara put the craft through its paces, the nimble little thing darting through the tumbling rocks and dust of the asteroid field with all the agility of a hummingbird. The unedited footage of this test run was a hit not just with those of their audience, but the wider galaxy on the whole when the clip leaked and went viral.
"They've no way to trace that back to me, correct?" Nevara's voice was thick with desperation as she turned to where Viatrix was bouncing across the screen on the low table in the rec room, a spread of social media sites where the clip of Nevara's flight was increasing in view count, "This is... not the kind of attention I want."
"Don't worry," Viatrix assured her, "Kith scramble the metadata on everything they upload - the system does it automatically - so even if people go digging around in that sort of thing, there's no way they're going to know its you unless they were there in that system while you were flying that thing around, creeping behind an asteroid to peep on you."
"That doesn't fill me with the relief I can only hope you intended to instill in me." Had been Nevara's terse reply to that, which got Viatrix giggling.
The first day of week five arrived with them closer to Usgaisjan space, but by the end of that day nothing interesting had pinged their scanners. In order to keep themselves occupied during the unremarkable hours of their search, the crew had been getting in more practice with their mech simulators, Elytra and V'tala having some more intensive low gravity training routines added to their daily exercises than the lighter ones employed by the others, as the four of them that had been kept in Thalatte captivity required nothing more rigorous than a refresher in the gravity chambers to get back into the swing of things.
As the night cycle aboard the ship well and truly got underway, they all retired to their rooms to prepare for bed, and V'tala indulged in a scalding hot soak in the tub of her private bathroom.
Built as they had been for Thalatte officers, the elite of society who demanded more creature comforts than the bare minimum the rest of their crew would be getting, the bathrooms all had amenities more befitting a luxury hotel than a combat vessel. The bathtub doubled as a shower stall, and that was normally how V'tala would go about taking care of her ablutions, but today a soak was more than welcome.
Her muscled burned with the pleasant ache of having pushed her limits further with her exercises that day, the hot water soothing it all to just background noise. In her old life, her training had been grueling, her recovery time as little as possible, and an indulgence like this absolutely unheard of. V'tala had first begun taking warm baths out of spite towards her former masters, but now she took them simply because she could.
With a data pad in one hand, and a mug of tea in the other, V'tala used her thumb to scroll through the novel she was reading. In an effort to further her knowledge of the peoples of the galaxy, she'd been seeking out culturally significant media from every known race. It was eye opening to see both how different and how similar the peoples of the galaxy were, some of the tropes in this Lacertus novel close enough to ones she was more familiar with in her own culture that she sometimes found herself forgetting she was reading something created by an entirely different race.
This particular novel was considered required reading because it had been written during a time of intense moral puritanism, and had dared to spit in the face of that social norm by including all number of taboo subjects. The author had not only been excommunicated but executed over what they had written, as they'd refused to kowtow to the demands of the leadership in their country and alter anything they'd put to page. Their death had ended up being the spark that ignited an inferno of sweeping social change, and so was lauded as historically significant because of it.
In that regard, V'tala could see how important this book was on a cultural level.
However, as a reader removed from the society in which this novel had first been penned, she found it a little lacklustre.
Most of the antagonistic characters in the piece were stand ins for religious and government figures she lacked the context to understand why the punishments they were receiving were in any way fitting, acts of brutality that, while they would have been shocking at the time, were tame to the point of blandness compared to other stories she'd read in recent days. The sexual acts on page, likewise, may have been provocative at a time when even considering the act for anything other than the purpose of procreation could land someone in prison, but they were dry, clinical things to read, eliciting an infuriating state of being on the cusp of arousal without actually doing enough to actually get V'tala there.
When the chapter, and the characters within it, reached an unsatisfying climax, V'tala huffed, downed the last of her tea before setting the mug down on the floor, and pulled up one of the educational sites that Rhea had given her. While not a trait found among all the species of the galaxy, there were plenty out there that had sex for pleasure as much as they did to propagate their species, and so there were numerous directories available that were full of both written instruction and video examples on how the different races of the galaxy copulated. This particular one was for both educational as well as entertainment purposes, with anything ranging from solo acts to groups of two and up, those involved from either the same species or wildly different, and every combination of sex and gender under the sun.
She'd gone through some of the content found on that site from a place of pure curiosity, the physiologies on display so wildly different from her own that she couldn't imagine how they could even bring either themselves or others to release, and had needed the videos to see how it was done.
She'd also utilized the site explicitly for titillation, her first spiteful search being usgaisjan women with one another. After how the culture she grew up in so strictly forbid it, it felt a fitting place to start.
She scrolled through the main page, adjusting filters as she went - women only, usgaisjan with any species as the partner(s), and for entertainment rather than education. A few she'd viewed before, but most she hadn't, the thumbnails and titles not really catching her fancy. Even swiping through the site as she was, she felt a warmth coil low in her belly that had absolutely nothing to do with the heat of her bath water, a far cry from what the novel she'd been reading had been able to bring out of her.
Usgaisjan with human, usgaisjan with necupole, usgaisjan with meleten, usgaisjan with deorviran, none of it was quite what she was looking for. She scrolled further down, eyes skimming what was on display, and when a shade of dark blue caught her eye she felt a rush of heat course down her spine so ardently that she fumbled her data pad, the splash of it hitting the water catching her in the face.
Plucking it out of the tub and shaking off what water that she could - thankful that the data pad was waterproof to a depth far greater than the bath she was lounging in - she scrolled back down to the thumbnail that had caught her eye.
An usgaisjan woman of deep emerald skin and moss green hair pinning a deupazing woman with rich cobalt skin and black hair down against white silk sheets.
Nothing about the woman was exactly the same - the wrong colour hair and skin, the latter of which was unmarred by either freckle or scar, her eyes were a bright plum colour, her horns two curled points that emerged from somewhere behind her hairline - but it was close enough that all V'tala could think of was Pryseia.
Her pulse thundered in her ears as the thought crested through her, her blood hammering in her core so powerfully that she felt lightheaded. In the still of the thumbnail, the two women were visible from the waist up, the usgaisjan braced with a forearm next to the deupazing's head, the supine woman with one hand curled possessively around the verdant woman's bicep, the other tangling in the short hair at the nape of her partner's neck, and from the expression on both their faces, they were obviously mid coitus.
It wasn't exactly shame that coursed through V'tala, but it was close enough that she closed her eyes with a groan, tipping her head back against the rim of the tub, her horns clacking against the porcelain. She didn't know what the protocol was in this type of situation, her body coiled in searing anticipation at just the thought of the other woman. She took a breath to try and steady the wild stampede of her heart, and for an instant she swore she could smell the warm scent of Pryseia's skin.
That very nearly sent her over the edge, and V'tala did nothing to stop the frustrated growl that escaped her.
Tipping her head forward again, she clicked on the thumbnail, her other hand delving down into the water. She'd wrestle with the implications of this later, because right now she simply could not think.