Chapter Text
I'm back with cigarettes and character development. Store was out of milk.
Enjoy.
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Ker’dna (pronounced: car-dan-ah) was ecstatic! First deployment and she was goddess-blessed to count herself amongst the first Shil’vati to grace Earth with the light of the Imperium. She practically vibrated in her seat at the thought. Deep! She hoped Earth’s men were every bit as virile and bountiful as she’d heard. No doubt it was true, the Empress does not lie, nor is the Datanet any less accurate than it should be. Shil’vati reconnaissance was a thing of wonders that every empire dreamed of.
She fidgeted against the belt biting into her tits through the thick Karb-On (pronounced: carbon) suit and cast her gaze around her. Her friend Lil’ak (pronounced: lilac) shot her a thumbs up, an almost metallic whir accompanying the motion. Just as the thumb rose up, the world below and beside became an incomprehensible bur of blues and greens. Her sharp helmet rose from her collarbone like a one-edge knife and cut through the air like a knife through butter. The current split into two cutting lines along her sides as she plummeted, her suit hummed and vibrated, which she felt little of due to how thick it was, compared to the standard uniforms.
Her suit screamed as it fell towards the rebel encampment. At first it sounded like a child’s scream but as her velocity increased the sound grew deeper and deeper.
She screamed with it.
This!
This is what she lived for!
…
The rebels heard nothing at first, then a whining dog, then a deep rumble like a warhorn, inching closer and closer, until,
Pak-
In a single second she landed headfirst into the encampment, her helm buried to shoulder level, and box-like suit flashed a blinding white, releasing all its stored up energy point blank in the form of a massive white ball that shrunk in for a moment, then burst like a popped bubble.
- WhoOOOOOM- FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA---HMHHHHHHH
The shockwave blew apart every man in a twenty foot radius and converted every building into live grenades, shattered them to minuscule fist-sized chunks as if they were made of glass,
She wiggled her arms out of their slots, coming free with a ‘Kik’ and used them to pry her head out of the dirt. She was lucky it wasn’t sand. The round shoulder pads served to ensure she got buried at her head and neck and resembled an overly bulky version of a pauldron. Her palms pushed against the dirt, biceps snapping to peaks in exertion, she felt like she was trying to compress air under her hands, resistance building and building like pressure in a clogged hose till her head rocketed out in an arc and promptly smashed the back of her head into the ground.
Godess-ARGH- Fucking Deep!
She’d remember to free herself gently next time.
Whelp! She winced while rubbing the back of her helmet, grateful for the protection, and began to survey her surroundings. She hoped she got those brotherfuckers good. No one, no matter how cowardly the bitch, should force a man to fight. She trembled at the thought of hurting a male, and then trembled in righteous hate at the titless wastes who’d forced her people’s hand. She calmed her brow relaxing as she breathed in the clean, filtered air. Retrieval wasn’t for another hour or so, she had plenty of time to appreciate the fruits of her labor.
So, she began to walk.
There was no blood for the first thirty feet, only ash. At forty feet she saw rectangular buildings blasted to bits. Like a giant picked them up, tore them in two halves. Then dropped one and crush-scattered the other into jagged, crooked buckshot.
At sixty feet she found bodies.
At eighty she could recognize them.
Men.
Disemboweled men. Men with caved in heads and missing limbs. Men with string-like threads of red for limbs and string-like threads for heads. Men stained an ugly red and mashed like a pinkish-red gruel with fingers sticking out the mush.
She panted in exhaustion, wisely swallowing the acid punching her uvula on recognizing every red smear.
Not a single woman.
Not a single woman to be seen.
She locked eyes with a head. Just a head. Viscera pooled under the scarlet stump like pink bubbles and its fresh, pink eyes stared through her. They were cloudy, red veins dug in at the edges like diseased tree root and crept upwards where she guessed it’s iris rolled all the way back. She could almost convince herself it was a doll. A macabre, pink-eyed doll that mother made to ‘toughen her up’.
K-K –KK-KCK-C-ck-ck-k-crk – Grsh!
A snooty chunk of rock smashed the head like a pumpkin. A worm-like glob of flesh splashed onto her visor, droplets of thick, clear fluid painted smears across her padded shins.
She wiped away the gore, her lip trembling and brow twisted in horror.
A crushing ache washed through her body in a wave, from her heart to the ends of her limbs. Small hairs stood on end and her lungs froze and hurt like she inhaled ice spikes. Every pore was on fire, her heart crushed itself and her eyes blinked and burned like a bonfire, and the death laid bare at her feet was fuel.
“UUrrgh!”
A sour green streak splashed against the interior of her helmet.
That was the first and only time she’d ever doubted the validity of their conquest.
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Her second year was better. A nice cozy station in a newly-minted yellow-zone.
Now if the males would just stop being such insufferable cunt-sores.
She couldn’t understand it, why were these humans still resisting?! Her people cured their diseases, graciously donated their technologies and sacrificed countless lives for the betterment of these primitives! A few dirt monkeys weren’t anything comparable to losses incurred by the Imperium. The sheer scale of ‘missing’ nobles was unheard of even during the Raikiri Moons!
She glared balefully into the face of a soldier who saw no issue taking advantage of that fact that her pod wasn’t made of boybashers.
‘I might change that if this stiff doesn’t back off’
“The fuck you think you are?! Read the sign, male only hours!”
“Which wouldn’t exist if hardworking soldiers like us didn’t tirelessly work to civilize the hellhole you call a city, human,” she hissed, saliva flying at the audacious male’s face, a dollop of spittle nailing him in the eye.
The translator on her breast could be as cold and clinical as it wanted, her demeanor left very little room for argument. The male shook in indignation, good, he wanted to act like a woman she would treat him like one. Human men seemed to like that, who knew; maybe she’d grace him with a notch on her bedpost. He was certainly pretty enough, all puffed up.
Ker’dna bumped his taller friend out of her way and claimed a seat at the bar, her girls followed. ‘They don’t know any better’ she reassured herself with a short exhale, ‘soon, they’ll see the light of the empire. Hmph. What kind of barbaric race let MEN work in dangerous jobs like security,’
She shook her head and whispered, “Primitives”
The bartender slid her a small glass of clear white liquid that burned her nose. Finally, at least someone knows their place. He was quite cute too. Small enough to sink against her breast, a dainty thing with his collar half down and an irresistible smile. He did his best to serve drinks among her pod.. In no time at all her pod were chatting excitedly amongst each other in slurred, hushed tones. Another round of the burning liquid stoked the heat in her stomach, as nimble, pale hands swiped the glasses from them, the bartender’s swaying tush ignited a fire her loins. Just as he walked past her, she grabbed his hand. Her palm slid up, gently squeezing the spongy-soft muscles of his forearms and up to his shoulder and neck. She felt his pulse, hard, heavy and so, so fast. She gazed into his eyes, wide in surprise, his plump lips trembling just as any male should on meeting a real woman.
He would do.
Third year. By every Imperial metric she could find, the war was over. ‘Most’ of Earth was officially pacified. Why then, was she languidly clasping the straps of her old Karb-On suit? Her heli-aviator jabbered on, same one as the invasion, but mouthy enough to fill the Deep.
“Could only get the suit to half charge, so expect some resistance on the ground, terrible ground by the way, weather in Af-whatever is terr-”
The shoulder-belt kept slipping out her hands.
“-rebel cell isn't as big as they used to be, but between us, I doubt it’ll be as clean a sweep this time around, like, Goddess did you s-”
Images flashed across her eyes of heads blown to pieces, holes in chests with boiling, sloshing flesh and strangled screams like the drowned. A tremble possessed her hands, her teeth raked across dry lips.
“Ey! You alright back there? Been mighty quiet-” they locked eyes for a brief moment, “-Deep! Sister, you high on mint!?”
“Duty is the o-only high I require,”
“Hmph, yeah. Don’t blame you, just do a good enough job that we don’t make a second run,”
Her breath stuttered. Her eyes pricked and she forced her hands to be steady. Just a bit more. Soon, the war will be over, so the Empress decreed. As a devout follower, she believed Her word whole-halfheartedly.
Soon.
__________________________________________________________________________
Fourth year.
Nothing.
Not even peace. Every day Green zones seemed slightly redder and redder.
Who knows, maybe they’d have another sector caked in enough red and blue blood to drown a child.
She had the pleasure of being at ground zero, one scene erected a temple in her mind alongside the mountain of men’s corpses from her first deployment. A human male and a Shil woman, the male dead on his feet. Both hands clasping an archaic sword that pierced the gigantic Shil, straight through her heart. Her body hunched over his, her fingers sunken to the knuckle through his neck, dripping hateful red onto the ground. The dead woman’s head craned down, the man’s, fixed up. Both their cloudy, empty gazes frozen in a tableau of hatred.
Do you know what color is produced when human and Shil blood gets mixed together?
Black.
Long, wet black streaks bleeding scarlet and blue at the edges connecting their bodies.
Every media outlet she had called this place a free-for-all pick-your-man planet. After not seeing a single male on anything other than a telepad for her entire life, it sounded like paradise... at first. One man all to herself? Such selfishness was unheard of in the Empire at large. Of course, it was too good to be true. After three years of painstaking work on this planet, she’d sent more men to the Deep than she’d let into her bed.
Honestly, by the sheer amount of men’s blood staining her hands, she wouldn’t be surprised if fresh recruits like her had killed all of them.
The Empress could never be wrong. But at the same time, nothing here seemed right. Nothing she’d heard was true. The narrative on the Empire’s one network still sold the image of a perfectly peaceful… prostitute planet.
That word, ‘prostitute,’ was new to her.
This drink stung the back of her throat, tears pricked the edge of her black sclera.
From the way she and her kin were treating the humans, it was… apt.
__________________________________________________________________________
During the fifth year, her last podmate died. Stabbed to death by a ‘Devout Servant Of The Emperor’. She’d almost torn his head off right then and there. Would’ve been easy too, he was a waif-like thing half her height and less than a fifth as wide, his pasty skin would look perfect stained red, his bones looked thin enough to break with a finger. His smirk…
Apparently, Mar’ah (pronounced: mar-a) had been mistaken for a noble of strikingly similar appearance. The result was this whore propositioning her after a particularly bad night on the town. Bullshit.
Mar’ah wasn’t getting any better. She’d taken to the human drink, vodka, in an attempt to silence the voices in her head that even Shil patented mind medicine couldn’t banish. Every eight days she’d drag back a Mar’ah, the lanky gal weighed down by half a bucket of tears and self pity. No amount of reassurance that the fault was not hers, that those men were not killed on her orders. That she tried her best to save them and failed.
That she didn’t assault him.
No matter how much or who spoke, Mar’ah paid little heed. She was hurting, and hurting bad. That was the only thing that mattered. A year into this, Ker’dna grew sick of it. A real woman would have moved on by now, no! A real woman wouldn’t have had this problem in the first place.
She made the mistake of saying as much.
A particularly bad night, the drinks smashed her manners, and… it was a mistake.
The hurt in Mar’ah’s Orange-gold eyes was raw. They had only each other now. Everyone else was dead or gone blessedly Offworld. It was just them. And she, the one woman who fought side by side with, who defended her against harlots and brotherfuckers, who believed her when she’d been accused.
The one person Mar’ah thought she could trust, hurt her. Dismissed everything she felt, dismissed her failures and experiences and emotions.
If someone was sad. You can’t just tell them ‘just don’t be sad’. That they had no right to feel that way. That the only reason they couldn’t get over it was because they were weak. It was their fault they were sad. Such nonsense should never leave one's lips.
She knew that now. She wished… so, so badly…that she knew it before
So she left. They’d argued and words turned venomous, in her stupid pride she’d chosen to leave. ‘Tell me when you get over yourself and can talk like civilized individuals.’ Bullshit, she was just as ill-mannered that night, even more so.
Pride.
That pride prevented her from resolving the situation. Weeks of silence, of letting her stumble through alleyways alone and unguarded. ‘She was a big woman, she can protect herself,’ even now I wonder how that thought came to me. Likely spite, I’d seen women twice her size gutted like clams by men thin enough to pass as sticks. Men who, often, pretended to be sticks, mud and green.
I should’ve known better’
I did, know better,
So, one night, she stumbled her way through the alleys. And on that night, this whore decided that a tearful marine, barely coherent enough to stand on her feet, was a fantastic mark. She wrung the truth from him easily, she’d been trained well after all. She was ‘on his side’. She wanted to kill him. He humiliated Mar’ah before her death. She was only found with half her uniform. He boasted about ridiculing the Shil, how he kicked in her tusks while she scrambled and groaned incoherently on all fours, too drunk to see straight. How she was so weak even he could hold her down, how she gave up after a while. How that meant she wanted it. How the only reason he killed her was because she bored him…
She ensured he was well past dead.
It wasn’t enough, she wanted to shoot every male in this whole sector, lay taxes on them till they had no choice but to submit. She wanted to raise punishments so the slightest hint of resistance laid enough charges to make the offender disappear. She wanted resistance to be such a far gone prospect, for them to be so thoroughly spent that the idea of it wasn’t just absurd, it was cut out. She imagined a world where these damned pinkies walked alongside her kind, hand in hand and she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t fathom it, the image blot in her mind by reds and blues and black…wet…coppery black stinging her nostrils. They didn't deserve to be uplifted. They didn't deserve any of it! These primitives didn’t even deserve a shallow grave.
She ensured that the bastard didn’t have one.
It didn’t make the dreams any easier. Only those fitful times, waking in a trembling daze with the ghosts of raucous laughter and strong, powerful arms raising her on their shoulders in triumph, or whispered grief only shared between two. Only then did she allow herself a tear.
Just one.
It was her fault, after all.
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Tail end of the sixth year, or so, she was assigned to covert ops. Her new ‘pod’ spent six months gathering enough evidence to launch a shadow raid on some noble cunt who’d thrown enough cash at the Earth to import a Shil mansion in the middle of an unclaimed forest.
They waited till her entourage had departed well from the premises, a few hundred feet and enough that no vehicle could speed her here in less time than they could comb the entire complex. The very best, they were.
Her squad was responsible for the basement; she took a certain satisfaction in how Shil metal crumpled under her augment like tin foil. She flicked on the light and on turning her eyes down, her eyelid snapped open so wide she feared her eyes would roll out her head.
Racks.
Humans, all ages from eight to eighty strung up on meat hooks like a bizarre parody of a turox butcher. Like a horror movie infinitely worse than anything a Shil mind could invent. Just as blasphemous as most human media. Her shock lasted all of a blink, she’d surfed as a Karb-0n bomber long enough that such things didn't… click as much as they should.
One of her squad almost threw up in uniform.
They ignored the bodies for now, alerting their comrades of the find and calling in immediate evac and confirmation.
Gently, they removed the limp humans from each hook, but they could never do so fast enough. For every three bodies she took down only one had a pulse. Those conscious enough to speak were rare, those conscious enough to see their saviors’ purple skin? She didn’t blame them for cowering even further.
One, however, didn’t seem to care.
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you,” the small human hugged her tight like a tourniquet. Repeated cries of gratitude drowned in her breast as the distraught child cried and cried and cried.
She hated humans. Hated them with every fiber of her being.
She gently rested a palm over the little boy’s greasy head and wrapped him in her warmth.
But… maybe, maybe, they didn’t all deserve it.
_______________________________________________________________________
Six years, and a half, seven-ish years, since the invasion. She’d forgotten to count. She’d gotten herself promoted to an odd mix between what humans called a ‘Drill Sergeant’ and a ‘Commander’. Least the pay was good, and she could help these rookies not make the same mistakes their foremothers had. Corruption had slowed, in her opinion. Excessive violence was a rare occurrence now. Targeted rebellion was the name of the game.
She got lucky, a recently-turned yellow-green zone, a good start to ease in her fresh crew. Shit! Almost ran over a moose. She turned down the windows and kept a hand on the wheel while fidgeting with her lighter.
Ker'dna puffed a noxious cloud of sick gray to part the frigid air currents. Said smoke billowed like a liquid slap over her face and forced a blink, briefly dividing her attention from the road.
"I'll feckin' stuff those cancer sticks where the sun don't shine if' ya don' done ‘em!"
L'MaKaida (pronounced: El-mick-kaiba) blustered, her short ass planted on the back seat. A chorus of raucous laughter following the pompous declaration. It was good to have a pod again. These jokers were growing on her, even if they'd not appreciated her occasional vices. Nevertheless -
-A figure rapidly grew in front of her headlights, sending a jolt of panic down Ker'dna's spine and her hard boot crushing the brake -
SKREEEEEEEE!
The purple brick she called a car swerved to the side, spraying dust in a smokescreen around them.
A black silhouette vaguely reminiscent of a pinkie stood like a statue through the brown mist.
"Hey! What gives?" Zhan'zha (pronounced: san-sa) complained, her voice every bit the whiny noble brat she were.
"Load up and set to high stun. Some stiff's holdin' us up", she grumbled in response. Idly pondering the likeliness of an ambush in a 'green' zone.
Her pod armed themselves, accompanied by an assortment of thrums and clicks from their equipment. Ker'dna wished they'd been this armed on arrival at this goddess-forsaken planet.
Ker'dna crouched beside her vehicle, sights on the human hidden behind the dust. It cleared slow as a Clamboar, until she beheld a human male, wearing a -
.
.
.
mask.... an ape mask?
The cloud still obscured her sight but even she could see that the human was short for his kind. Head barely reaching past her belt if she'd stood. He appeared to pose in place, both knobbish arms proudly grasping his hips and chin haughtily jutting up.
Her brain froze and mouth with it, jaw loose with disbelief. She rapidly blinked, scanning the surroundings for any sign of foul play.
The road was even.
There was no reasonable cover to be seen.
Even when straining her augmented ears she couldn't hear a single clank or hum or even a song of steel.
Ker'dna's eyes scrunched together in mute confusion.
"Boss?" L'MaKaida whispered on comms, the rest of her pod lined beside the AV, "What's the plan?"
A beat of silence passed, Ker'dna forced steel into her eyes and spat a curt instruction, "Form-6 (formation: hexagram) . Approach very slowly and stop at three meters, if he's holding something bulky, shoot, same for weapons,"
"But he's just a lil boy, what's the worst-"
"You die," Ker'dna snapped at the wilting Zan'zha, the newest addition to her pod and green as could be.
It took her a while to get it, but human men were the equivalent of women, and every bit as hateful, spiteful and nasty as that entailed. Human children? Worse. She'd dropped all concepts of chivalry after a man with eyes like a berserk Grinshaw gutted her battle-sister.
She could still feel the slick, squishy entrails.
Her teeth clenched as if to break and she stalked forward, aim trained on the small figure standing motionless in spite of six advancing marines. But, something wasn't right.
Her eyes focused, really focused and she beheld a tremble in his limbs. A back so ramrod straight it almost tilted back and feet sliding away in infinitely small amounts.
Her tense shoulders dropped, the rifle becoming a little heavier in her loosened grip.
She sighed wearily. This was a green zone. The kid was bare in, the humans called it, almost sub-zero clad in nothing but a worn out t-shirt that'd seen better days and a grey sweatpants he'd clearly outgrown.
A small ache resonated in her breast as she truly saw him. Surrounded in a rough semicircle, with weapons trained on his arrogant, yet clearly defiant form.
Curse her bleeding heart.
Rage boiled hot in her chest.
Curse this fucking kid.
She stood up and strode towards him, docking her weapon on the back holster to the babbling horror of her podmates. Her hand roughly seized him by his left shoulder, almost wrapping right around and dragging him towards her. She growled, "State you-"
And then she was flying.
CRUNCH!
Her back collided with a patch of frozen sand, spine arched as 'Mother Earth' punched a breath out of her lungs. The world rang loud like two hammers on her skull. She clumsily rolled onto her stomach, an aching cough stuck in her throat.
What in the Goddess just happened?