[OT] - Story thread: Xenology Resurrected

[dogscoff]

Something was wrapped around her neck. She pulled desperately at it in the darkness, but it didn't give. Just then the grip was released and she felt her armband being tugged away, and with her newly-returned breath she screamed. To be simply murdered- stabbed or strangled or bludgeoned- was one thing, but to lose the armband, to be abandoned to the fate that would mean... that was far worse. It was night, and in the sheer blackness her panic was rising. The KanesS had built domes and tunnels for their own use, but parts of the city remained undomed and despite the harsh winter the occupiers didn't see much point supplying power to these Xiati-occupied provinces. She struggled on blindly, fighting for her life.

Once upon a time she wouldn't have even noticed the dark- infravision and even radar were common enough enhancements among the Xiati- but her modified senses had been disabled along with most of her other cybernetics as part of her enslavement. Every night she hurried through the haunted streets after each day's work, desperately hoping to get home without incident. The armband was her life. It was a signal to all KanesS that this Xiati was worth more alive than eaten, and that her death would be punishable in kind to anyone who thought otherwise. However, it protected only her life. Her meagre possessions might still be seized by any of the KanesS bullies who roamed the Xiati district and stole from the residents, and they could never be entirely trusted to control their appetites anyway, armband or not.

So far- until tonight- she had been lucky. She had never been attacked, and her home raided only a few times. Her mate stayed mostly at home now to protect what little they had. The KanesS were cowardly creatures, and his mere presence was enough to deter them. When she got home he would then be free to go out and try to bring them some food and fuel - Where he found these necessities Xel neither guessed nor asked, but once she had come to find him skinning and gutting a pair of KanesS. "We won't get in trouble" he had said, "they weren't anyone important." He ate his fill that night, but Xel had been sickened and chose to remain hungry. It had been especially hard in those early months, and they had spent days arguing over the choices that had brought them here.

The choice to move to the colonies had been a difficult one to start with. Xel had wanted nothing more than to stay on the homeworld and raise a family, but when it became apparent that they were unable to conceive, he had finally persuaded her to start a new life of the frontier. However that choice had been relatively easy compared to the one that followed it less than a year later.

The predictor first began hinting at the possibility of an invasion months before it happened, and the Imperial command ignored the warnings. Perhaps their own predictors gave different indications- it happened sometimes- or perhaps they had some other reason to hand millions of lives over to the butcher-worms. Whatever it had been, the Empire refused to evacuate the system, and prepared only a token defence. The people of Nihal were left to their own devices, as the predictor gave stronger and stronger indications of an overwhelming invasion. Amid the riots, the bombings and the desperate charges on the blockaded spaceport, discussions arose concerning the best course of action should the system fall. It came down to the two basic options: To fight and die, or simply to give in an die voluntarily. It had become the only real subject for debate or discourse in the system during that time. In light of this gruesome decision, Xel considered her lack of offspring a blessing rather than a curse.

Fierce arguments had raged throughout the system as militant, terrorist and counter-terrorist Groups had formed, fought, splintered and fused, and for a great many Xiati the choice of how to die was taken away from them. Some argued that to fight and die was the nobler alternative, and that suicide was nothing more than cowardice. However, those in favour of suicide pointed out that a combatant had less chance of ensuring that his body would not be eaten. It was well-known that the KanesS invaded for meat, so perhaps suicide was the braver option after all: A well-executed self-destruction could deny the KanesS the flesh they wanted and - hopefully- discourage further aggression against other targets. After painful deliberation, Xel and her mate had opted for suicide, but when the moment came, they looked at one another found they just couldn't do it. When the KanesS offered a third option- slavery- they decided to take it.

She told herself that she was staying alive so that there would be someone for the relief force to rescue- that she would be able to give them valuable information about the enemy, having lived among them, but really she knew she was simply afraid to die. She wasn't ashamed of that- she considered survival to be a valuable instinct- but she was ashamed that she would have to work the predictor for them. The predictor gave an enormous advantage in combat, and since the KanesS mind seemed utterly unable to grasp the temporal technology that the cast apparatus relied upon, they had offered life to those Xiati able to maintain and operate it. She knew the other martyrs would have been disgusted at this collaboration, but then she reminded herself that they were all dead, and with that she gave herself over to slavery.

That was one thing she could give the KanesS credit for. Xiati slavemongers throughout their own turbulent history had talked about "moral servitude" or "uncompensated co-operation", but the KanesS saw no reason not to call it what it was. She worked long hours at the predictor without payment and - apart from the odd scrap thrown her way when the KanesS engineers were feeding - was expected to take care of her own food, shelter and necessities. All she received in exchange for her efforts were the two precious armbands, which the aliens did at least seem to honour. There had been one or two exceptions resulting in Xiati deaths, but those had been as much due to Xiati carelessness as anything else, and the death penalty had been enforced on the perpetrators. She had been surprised at the severity of the punishment at first- she could hardly believe that they thought a Xiati life was worth a KanesS one- but it seemed it was the only deterrent strong enough to counter their appetites. She still received hungry looks on a daily basis, but in time they began to intimidate her less and less. It remained a daily terror going to work with those monsters, but there were times that she almost forgot about their nature and began to regard them as people. Certainly, the educated ones treated her with more respect than they did their own servants- although admittedly that still wasn't much. They listened when she spoke, and- apart from the more aristocratic ones- they seemed quite ready to accept that she was at least as good an engineer as any of them. They still made worrying jokes and comments about her flavour, but as her grasp of their language improved she realised that they sometimes made similar jokes about one-another, and when she tentatively suggested one day that she might bite the tail off of one of the less productive junior engineers to stop him coiling on it all day long, they all laughed with approval. That moment of acceptance shocked her, and she tormented herself for days with memories of the atrocities committed by these people- no, these monsters, wishing she had given herself to martyrdom after all. Once again she began thinking of ways she might sabotage the predictor or give false information that would ruin their fleet, but the predictor was clear: Any fleet that entered Nihal would be destroyed. The KanesS fleet was growing steadily with re-inforcements and capured craft, and although the Xiati Imperial command sent fleet after fleet into Marak, they all withdraw again before engaging the enemy. Either their own predictors simply couldn't give them a favourable result, or the Imperial command was a bunch of dithering krsssthrll*.

At about this time- when her morale was at its lowest- she had more or less decided upon suicide. She was only halted in this by another shocking discovery: Despite the fact that she and her mate had been almost too exhausted for anything more than survival, she was pregnant. It was at once her dream come true and her worst nightmare. She had been exceedingly lucky to negotiate one additional armband for her mate, who was not directly useful to the occupiers. What would her chances be of securing another? If she asked for one and they refused, they would surely guess why she wanted it and take the baby from her. She knew she couldn't possibly bear that. What if she promised to raise and educate the child to do her job and replace her? It seemed the KanesS were inherently incapable of understanding the technology, and they would have to appreciate the long-term necessity of a live Xiati presence. Wouldn't they? It was a source of enormous worry to her, until the night she was attacked.

Another sharp tug and the armband tore free, taking a layer of skin with it. As soon as it was clear of her body it let out a high-pitched whine, and she heard the attacker hiss in surprise. It made sense that the armband should have some kind of built in tamper-protection, and she knew that the KanesS guard would be on their way. They would help her, but only if she had the armband. She lunged forward and found her assailant in the darkness, her fingers connecting with bone. It was a jaw, and from there she was able to locate a throat. Fuelled by fear, she grasped it and squeezed, and held on tight as the other party thrashed and squirmed, finally landing a powerful blow to Xel's stomach. She felt something fragile within her break, and it was with a rage she had never even imagined that she crushed the life out of the creature in her hands.

When the guard arrived, their vehicle's floodlights illuminated an inert, vacant Xel with blood seeping from under her armband. She was kneeling before the corpse of a tattered and scrawny escaped Xiati meat-prisoner. The guards made a few jokes and took the body away. They said they were taking it back to the slave's owner, but they threatened and bribed her until she promised not to mention this episode, then laughed again as they sped off again, leaving her once more in darkness. Eventually she picked herself up and started walking back home without neither fear nor hope, untroubled by thoughts of either suicide or survival, without feelings of remorse, forgiveness, hate, love or anything else at all.


Footnote:
*"krsssthrll" is a KanesS word, with a literal meaning of "sack" or "store", but which is usually used to describe someone who is inefficient, ineffectual, indecisive and whose only real worth is as a source of protein. Not surprisingly, the Xiati language that Xel was brought up in lacks a concise translation, which is probably why she uses a KanesS term here.