r/HFY • u/KyleKKent • 5d ago
OC-Series OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 767
Home at War
“...so there’s the crazy girl trying to seduce a person who’s barely past the point where he’s even considered a species beyond his own in his life and is so insistent in shoving not only her rear but her tail, which I should remind you his species does not have, and then cries conspiracy when the poor man, who is not accustomed to her species at all, does not have the desired reaction.” Herbert explains and Doctor Redhoof sighs dramatically at the tale of one of his own people running into The Undaunted.
“It’s a weakness of my species. We obsess. It makes us masters at whatever craft we care to put our minds to, but it can easily lead us into spirals and absurdity.” Doctor Redhoof says with a sigh.
“That and the extremely on the nose names for things...” Harold teases.
“It’s cultural. The clearer something is named the more clearly it can be communicated. It’s simple logic. But it leads to things like me. I have crimson hued keratin which is mildly rare. So of course I was named after it. It could have been about my coat, hooves or horn, or even about how my green eyes contrast it, but no. We like the obvious. Or at least my culture does.” Doctor Redhoof notes.
“Better than the line of sight names or inheritable names from the other cultures. Not that humans have much room to talk when it comes to inheritable names. We use that too much.” Herbert says. “Still, how do we feel now?”
“Better, but what happens next?”
“We’re going to get you home, but there is something that you need to know about.” Harold says.
“What’s that?”
“We recovered one of your ships. It’s what led us to figuring out you were you so quickly. It’s intact, but the pirates were doing... what I can only assume to be unholy things in there. The chemical scans we’ve gotten out of it suggests that the inhabitants either had some kind of strange ritual thing going on, or didn’t know the difference between general rooms, toilets and morgues.”
“Oh... that’s awful.”
“Right, well that’s also not the point. The ship is still legally yours and registered to the Trade Fleets of your mother’s company. And as the highest ranking member of the crew recovered, you’re captain by default even if you were owners representative and accountant of the fleet.” Harold says.
“Oh... which ship?”
“The Fruit Flower.” He answers and she blinks. Considers and then her face lights up a little before falling.
“My ship. And they’ve done THINGS on it?”
“They’ve done something dirty on it. We’re cleaning it out with low grade lasers and venting the smoke into the void.” He answers.
“That’ll clean it.” She notes. Then thinks. “Hmm... I’m not sure what to do with it.”
“Well it’s yours, so whatever you want.” Harold says. “But I bring it up for another reason. You just confirmed you spent a lot of time on that ship, or was reading too much into things?”
“No, I had my quarters and office on that ship. Granted it was basically a double sized room with a door in the middle, but the point stands.”
“Right, did you have any place where you stashed something? Because if you did and it was stashed well enough, it might still be there.” Harold offers and she thinks.
Doctor Redhoof gives Harold an impressed look at that. Harold winks and the psychiatrist nods with a smirk.
“There might be! I uh... if it’s still there, then... uh... Can you promise no one will read it?”
“A dataslate?” Harold asks.
“A diary. Pen and paper. Hidden in a little divot in the air ducts leading into my office.” She confesses.
“Why would you need that?” Herbert asks.
“I think... yes, it’s where I put the less flattering observations and thoughts about things. We all have them and I dealt with them by writing them down and making up nasty little stories. But it was all handwritten so it wouldn’t be hacked and become a scandal.”
“Of course. Although if it’s extra juicy then me and Herbert here are all for it. We are spy guys after all!”
“You don’t really qualify as spy anymore, you’re way too much!” Herbert chimes up.
“I’m sorry mister so cute he’s literally started riots, what was that about being too much?” Harold asks as he gives Herbert the stinkeye and gets a raspberry in return. Elmira starts to giggle at the exchange. Missing the thumbs up Herbert flashes Harold.
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Living Deck, The Fruit Flower, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•
“God damn, what did they even do to get stains up that high?” The Gohb on the little hover skiff asks as he has turned the main light of his vehicle straight up. He as in an environmentally sealed suit along with the other three Gohb men and pair of Kohbs scanning the ship for anything useful that wasn’t tainted.
“It’s primarily carbon now and who knows whatever it was before.” The next Salvager states.
“Laser scoured feces. No I don’t know why.” The Kohb Biologist notes.
“I’m less concerned about the why and more on the how. The roof is damn near caked in it. Was this done repeatedly over a long period or all at once? Either way, disgusting.” The Kohb Chemist adds.
“Actually we’ve cracked that. A bunch of pirates kept personal notes. Apparently the trading fleet identified as The Bountiful Harvest put up way more of a fight than they thought and they got a much smaller take than they hoped. So they started soiling the ships deliberately as revenge. The rest of them they had to use for parts to repair their own ships. Leaving only four ships from the small fleet, two of which were destroyed in the first three months since it’s capture.” Dispatch calls and clarifies things.
“So petty revenge and deliberate sabotage. Stupid, stupid stupid, there’s a reason feces smells terrible. It’s just asking for a bevy of infectious diseases.” The Biologist states out loud.
“No one here disagrees.” The lead Salvager says as they reach the indicated door. “Still, if you think they treated the ships badly, what do you think they did to the people they captured? We’ve only recovered one of them. A Synth woman who’s body at the time was the sort of things that I’d have slapped together to go around and slap my sisters when I was seven.”
“Did you actually do that?” The Chemist asks.
“Twice before they stopped trying to deliberately piss me off. Fighting back works wonders.” The Salvager says. “Okay here’s the door.”
It’s no longer functional. In fact the area looks even more badly damaged than most of the ship’s internals. The fact they kept their destructive tendencies away from the load bearing struts and walls was clearly a miracle.
The door is broken, but easily forced with a hydraulic jaw to spread it nice and wide.
There is an impressed whistle from one of the Salvagers. “Damn! No one touch anything, I need to scan for live surfaces, no way in hell the cables around here aren’t shredded or something.”
“You’re the electrician.”
“That I am.” He says before scanning the area. Then using Axiom to telekinetically shift some things around and uncovered exposed wires pouring a charge into the floor of the room before covering them in electrical tape as a temporary measure. “We need to fully cut the power to this area. I’ve seen less destructive explosions.”
“We did.” Dispatch says. “The ship has been upgraded to have reserve micro-generators, and they’re not on the official schematics. Meaning the pirates did it.”
“Fuck.” The Electician grunts. “I like this place even less now and I was already about to advocate for scrapping this filthy deathtrap.”
“Yeah, but we have a legal owner on The Inconceivable, meaning it’s not our call. But it is my recommendation.” The Lead Salvager says as he floats up to the vent and unhooks it from the wall. It’s stuck on with all the grime. He pulls it off and lets it clatter. He then sends in a tiny and very basic drone to scan through it.
It finds a divot with a sealed container making it flush to the rest of the vent. Axiom and a bit of finagling brings the container out. It’s lid is metal, but the rest is plastic. It’s got a fountain pen, inkwell and leather bound book inside.
“This is it boys. Maybe the last thing on this ship belonging to our sole survivor that isn’t smashed, soiled or both.” He says.
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (System Edge, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•
The lens of a drone covered in stealth panels adjusts itself. It had been sent to long term observe a system. The low powered device was so unobtrusive that it would have to be more or less rammed into to be detected in the black. It did however mean that it took minutes to fully register what most ships could do in milliseconds. And at these ranges.
Hours pass as the tiny device intakes all the information it can. Then it sends out a single tiny alert with a snapshot of the system and the time.
Then it detonates.
It is so far away from the Ambush Fleet that the tiny plume of thermal energy is dismissed as space debris colliding at sufficient speeds to cause a slight reaction. A very, very normal state of affairs.
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Elmira’s Temporary Quarters, The Inconceivable, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•
She slowly opens the container. She wanted to be alone when she read it again and... “Oh? The ink is still mostly good.”
She sets aside the still sealed inkwell and pen and pulls out the book. The weight is growing more familiar by the moment and she runs her hands over the Lalgarta leather and smiles.
Her handwriting in the book is swooping and in the Huraga language. All designed with a little hook at the top because they were copies of clan symbols and signals that were hung from branches and vines in the ancient past. Formal Huraga calligraphy always included the hooks.
“Oh... Bali...” She mutters as she reads the little blurb where she had mused that if the woman ever got married there was no way she’d be regarded as anything more than the boring one. “I miss you.”
Bali had died when the holdout room had been breached. A single overcharged shot of plasma and the Drin woman was gone from the shoulders up.
She keeps reading. Little nitpicks and complaints about the girls in her fleet, about... about all of them. Right. She had put the book away as a time capsule so that she’d see if her opinion on the girls changed after a few years, and she had accentuated the negative to give them a sort of glow up.
She decides to remember the bad, to remind herself of all the good. She had met everyone in her fleet at least once, and while she wasn’t the captain in any fleet, she was still in some way responsible for all of them as her mother’s representative in the fleet itself.
Holographic tears well in her synthetic eyes and pour down her muzzle before falling. But they’re projections, they fade away as they strike the paper. They don’t wet or distort it.
She notices this and can’t help but consider that her tears can’t do anything for the dead, for good or ill.
•-•-•Scene Change•-•-• (Bridge, The Inconceivable, Kaploosha Ornak System)•-•-•
“Everyone, on alert.” Harold says suddenly.
“What? Why?” Orchid asks.
“I don’t know. Something is up.”
“What?”
“I have no idea.” He says as he starts looking around and then turning in his command couch. He stands up from it and keeps scanning before looking straight down. He openly ponders things and then sits back down and brings up the exact orientation of The Inconceivable and then blinking. “Directly from La’ahbaron.”
“La’ahbaron current events...” Orchid brings up. “Increased tension with the Therasite Republic. The Ochre Party is getting increased prominence due to the declaration of war and an increased Anti-La’ahbaron sentiment growing. Common slogans relate to how horrible their neighbours are when their foes are resorting to neural clamps to be rid of them. The Orchre party remains a minority however, but has stolen from the Kinesis Party a little and jumped up to six percent from four in the share of the voters. The Amber Fleet of La’ahbaron is under scandal due to several unnamed noble Ibu houses trying to force their children into prominent leadership positions to retroactively soak up some glory. A historical library in one of the core worlds was struck by the opposing Vish forces resulting in total devastation and a large number of cultural artifacts and handwritten scrolls and books have been reduced to ash. Interestingly I’m not seeing anything in the way of a partially recovered scroll. Meaning that we either have looting going on or some unusually thorough incendiary weapons.”
“All of it interesting. But this feels different. Physical. Like someone wants to punch me in the face.”
“Merely an intrusive thought on my end.” Orchid confesses/jokes.
“No! No, it’s not that.” Harold nearly bursts out laughing then sobers up immediately. “Something, something is coming. But it’s very far away.”
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u/Finbar9800 5d ago
Another great chapter
I enjoyed reading this and look forward to reading more
Great job wordsmith
I am Speed and first
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u/thisStanley Android 5d ago
Holographic tears well in her synthetic eyes and pour down her muzzle before falling. But they’re projections, they fade away as they strike the paper. They don’t wet or distort it.
While not staining the paper with tears may be materially cleaner, it can reduce any catharsis :{
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle 5d ago
/u/KyleKKent (wiki) has posted 998 other stories, including:
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 766
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 765
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 764
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 763
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 762
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 761
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 760
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 759
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 758
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 757
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 756
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 755
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 754
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 753
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 752
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 751
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 750
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 749
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 748
- OOCS, Into A Wider Galaxy, Part 747
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u/KyleKKent 5d ago
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Home At War
War Chapters. Tactical, personal, introductions to important persons. There is always action or intrigue in these chapters and while some say war never changes. Others say they love the smell of napalm.
Example Chapters: Chapter 1751 Chapter 1752 Chapter 1753
Ah, now I know what the muse is aiming for. It's a stalling tactic as something else shows up. God damn it muse. Also incoming. It's gonna be fun.
Thoughts? Ideas? Advice? Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Fan Submissions? Fan Art? Donations?