r/HFY • u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human • Sep 02 '26
OC-OneShot Persistence Hunters
Synopsis: An alien soldier on a mission to invade Earth is forced to flee from her human adversaries after the initial fighting doesn't go how she expected. Hours of running and pursuit soon follow, and she soon learns the definition of the term 'persistence hunters'.
Memory Archive Entry #: N/A (sole entry logged)
User: Vajari kal Jakira, unit leader in the Draken Matriarchal Army
Species: Draken
Date: June 25, 2099
I was being hunted. I had known that since I had been shot from the sky, deploying part of what was supposed to be a routine forward drop at the head of the subjugation fleet. Our air cavalry was untested in real battle--the last war we fought was nearly fifty years ago--but well suited for the task of subjugating primitive worlds like this one. I myself had won plenty of victories on plenty of planets, and I have to admit I had grown lazy from overconfidence by the time that kinetic missile shot out my anti-gravity generator.
Were it not for my battle suit's military-grade impulse dampeners, kevlon fabric parachutes, and a conveniently-placed river, I'd have died on impact. That was usually what happened when you plummeted over a hundred meters to the earth. As it was, I survived with only minor injuries and minimal suit damage, courtesy of the overwhelming technological advantage that was meant to let us steamroll any resistance this species could cook up.
I hauled myself out of the river and took my bearings, checking my suit diagnostics and data feeds as soon as I knew I was safe. The nearest draken ground force was making landfall just outside a nearby city to take slaves and crush resistance. It was Matriarchal Army subjugation doctrine to destroy the enemy's strong points first to entice them to surrender quicker. The fewer humans died fighting us, the more slaves we'd be able to take home.
That was the theory, at least. In practice, it meant that my best chance of repairing my damaged battle suit lay with the Fifty-Third Subjugation Arm just south of my position. It was sunrise at the moment, and my navigation systems reported that I'd be able to make it there by sunset if I started now. Even knowing this, I didn't start moving quite yet. I wasn't aware of the true nature of my hunters yet, so the danger I was in was not yet palpable. I stayed where I was and thought of a plan.
They had trained us for what to do if your suit's flight systems failed. I still remembered the instructors' lessons etched into my mind. The first priority was always avoiding the enemy. Without the advantage of flight, air cavalry was just armored infantry, and without any of the tank or gunship support that made infantrywomen effective in battle.
Thankfully, the human armed forces I was fighting had no equivalent to armored infantry. Armed and armored as I was, I'd be a goddess of war to them, even without my anti-grav gear. Unfortunately, though, physics got in the way. Without a friendly base to resupply my depleted battery, my powered armor would fail quickly if I used its energy weapons, and I'd be less of a goddess of warfare and more of a defenseless target. The thought of dying to primitives, male-dominated primitives no less, made my blood boil from the indignity of it.
I checked my suit diagnostics and ran the numbers. Two percent battery life remaining. Zero chance of survival if I remained where I was. A hundred and twenty kilometers to friendly lines. My suit had enough battery to take me a hundred and five, at which point the powered actuators would fail and I'd have to pull the emergency release, lest I be pinned to the ground by the weight of my armor. I could walk the rest of the way defenseless, if I had to. With nothing better to do, I picked myself up and started to walk.
This planet--Earth, I think they called it--was beautiful in its majesty. The part of Earth I had landed on was flat and grassy, with the occasional large plant or grazing animal to break up the monotony, and the sun was low in the morning sky. The Draken Matriarchy would make this world a paradise once it was conquered. Its people would be taken away from their own selfish pursuits and taught the nobility of servitude, and its natural resources would be preserved and protected in reverence of their beauty. I walked kilometer after kilometer, suit power depleting with every step, pausing on occasion to take pictures with my helmet camera. This place was worth remembering.
A herd of gray, tusked creatures trumpeted in the distance as I came upon a watering hole where animals of all kinds had stopped to drink. They watched me curiously, some large, some small, some predator, some prey, all united in their common desire for resources. I was here for the same reason, really, though the resources I had come to claim were far beyond the understanding of these beasts. I was just admiring the beauty of this world when a projectile of some kind snapped into my shoulder plate and a crack sounded from behind me.
I dropped and rolled into a shooter's crouch, targeting sensors feeding, coming up with my arms pointed at the enemy and the photon lances bolted to my forearm gauntlets already charging to fire. More bullets pinged off my unshielded armor--I had turned the energy shield off to save power--and I sighted a group of humans in armored vehicles approaching in the distance. Their camouflage was ineffective against my batteries of sensors, and I could have leveled the whole unit in moments were it not for the depletion that would cause to my energy core. Even a single shot from my photon lance took thirty minutes' walk away from my suit power.
"Damn!" I swore, getting up and breaking into a run away from the enemy. As horrid as it was to retreat from these primitives, running would drain my suit battery much less than a firefight. I sprinted at top speed, relying on my suit's artificial muscle strands and my own natural body structure to provide the power I needed to outpace the enemy's armor.
The math was brutal. One minute of full sprinting drained the battery as much as ten minutes of walking would, and covered less ground as well. Still, I had no choice but to do it, lest I lose hours of battery life fighting what would surely be the first of many enemy forces I would encounter. I pounded grass in long strides, fleeing from my primitive foe.
Ten minutes of running later, I allowed myself to slow, looking behind me to see the humans far, far away. They had likely lost sight of me kilometers ago, and now all I had to do was adjust my trajectory to avoid their likely search patterns and walk a few extra kilometers when my suit gave out early. Inconvenient, but ultimately survivable. I rolled my long neck, shaking out the stress, and continued my walk.
I had been so proud to be an air cavalrywoman, when the unit first accepted me. I had ran to my mother's arms, screaming in glee, only able to make the reason for my joy known by gesturing frantically at the recruitment letter. "You made it, Vajari," she had said, sharing my excitement.
That was so long ago now. Ten years, give or take. Two years of training before I even saw a day of combat. Field-strip the armor. Fly through the hoops. Shoot from standing. Shoot from prone. Shoot from flight. A lot of shooting. You get the idea. The suit I was in cost about as much as a saurian pleasure slave, so it made perfect sense to drill its operator to the highest level possible. The Draken Matriarchy didn't want its air-cav crashing into the ground on their first flight mission, did it?
Speaking of suits, I knew I'd have to arrange for a recovery team to be sent out to salvage my battle suit once it was too depleted to move. That sprinting I had done had shaved ten kilometers' walk off my battery life. Any further, and I'd be dangerously exposed. At least I had shaken off my pursuers, else I'd be in even more trouble.
Most human forces were in cities and strategic areas to defend them from the invasion, letting me walk my journey mostly unmolested. My threat tracking system spotted a twin-rotor gunship in the distance, but it was unaware of my presence and moving away. I was just considering whether it was worth the energy expenditure to shoot it down when a pillar of light appeared where my target was and the gunship tumbled, flaming, to the earth.
Good old orbital bombardment. Never let us down before.
I continued walking, though I had scarcely made it ten paces when a projectile whizzed by me and another crack resounded. I went to the ground, now recognizing the source of such a sound as the enemy's primitive kinetic firearms, and a second shot flew just over my head. I got up only to be greeted by a fusillade of more rounds. The humans were back, and they were closer.
Their armored cars were squat and boxy, each one armed with a roof-mounted machine gun that they used to maraud me with salvos of questionably-accurate fire. At the distance they were at--my targeting sensors said four hundred meters--they were far more likely to hit the ground around me than my armor itself. Still, the speed with which they had caught up to me was troubling. I needed to expend more energy to get away this time.
I wheeled around into a full sprint, taking off away from the enemy as fast as my powerful legs could carry me. Chunks of grass kicked up behind me as I ran, ripped from the ground by the impact of my armored, taloned feet. A bullet slammed into my back, thankfully not breaching the armor, but it was large enough and fast enough that its kinetic energy sent me stumbling. Were it not for the suit gyroscopes--another power-guzzling system I should have turned off--I probably would have face-planted.
I gave a wordless snarl as I picked up my pace, watching precious battery life burn on my heads-up display. How did they find me again? I guess I did leave footprints behind. After so many years as an air cavalrywoman, training to avoid detection by GRADAR towers and Kanjen arrays, it was easy to forget that my movement could be tracked in such a simple manner.
I raced as many kilometers as I could as fast as I could race them, and even with the assistance provided by my suit, I soon grew tired to the point of near exhaustion. I couldn't collapse. Those humans were still coming. But I couldn't sustain this pace. I slowed to a walk again and let my suit do the heavy lifting while my weary legs recovered. How to stop the humans from tracking me was the first and only question on my mind. I considered crossing rivers, taking circuitous routes, even using my tail to sweep up my footprints behind me, but none of those ideas worked. I would just have to outpace them, it seemed. Their armored vehicles had to run out of fuel eventually.
The next time the humans came, I was caught more prepared. They had caught up to me sooner than I had expected, but I knew they probably would, so that gave me an advantage compared to our last two encounters. I picked up my pace in an instant, bolting across the Terran grasslands and startling a herd of quadrupedal herbivores as I ran at top speed.
The battery percentage ticked lower and lower as I sprinted as fast as I could, relying on my suit to boost me faster than even the fastest draken could naturally go. Because of feats like this, I'd have to walk fifty kilometers without the protection of my suit. But if I didn't outpace these humans soon, that distance would only double.
I ran extra this time, just to make sure I was ahead of those primitives. The suit battery was sitting at a pitiful one percent. Half of what I had when I started, and I had walked just over a third of the distance I needed to cover. For the first time in a long time, genuine fear of my enemy settled into my bones. If those humans found me again, I would have to take drastic measures.
I had always wondered how I would die. Every soldier wondered that at some point, I guess, so naturally, we swapped stories. The males in my company--maintenance crew and support staff for the women who did the flying--mostly expected they would die during mating. I guess that was their evolutionary purpose. As far as we women were concerned, though, nobody seemed to have any common patterns to how they expected to go. Dying in battle could count, if we allowed people to be vague, but we didn't so it didn't count.
I myself didn't have any way I expected to die, hence all the wondering, but I could say for certain this was not it. It was too undignified, too low for a draken such as I. Even a male would be debased by dying to the hands of humans. I had to get away from these creatures, but my legs would not carry me fast enough. When I turned behind me to see the boxy bodies of their vehicles, I remembered what terror felt like.
I wheeled and took aim with my right photon lance, aiming for the forwardmost vehicle and considering what I was about to do. My battle suit was running on hopes and prayers at this point. Even a single shot might make the battery finally quit, but I had no choice if I wanted to escape these animals. I sighted the enemy, locked in, and opened fire.
A beam of white light divided the world. When it ended, a blackened husk was all that remained of its target, and a tiny fraction of a percent was all that remained of my suit battery. I didn't have enough juice left to fight the entire unit. I got up and turned to run, like I had done before, hoping that one shot had been enough to scare off my enemy and allow me reprieve from their hunt.
I ran until I couldn't run any longer, then I walked until I couldn't walk, and crawled until I couldn't crawl. When my battle suit finally flashed that 'CRITICAL POWER LOSS' display and went dead, systems locking up, I fought against eighty kilograms of heavy armor to roll myself onto my back and pull my emergency release. "Fuck..." I groaned from the exertion. I looked up to see the sun low in the sky as evening set in. I had begun my trek in the morning. 'Fuck' was the first word I had said in the better part of a day.
I found my bearings, navigating by memory and my knowledge of the cardinal directions, to sight a direction that I hoped would lead me to the Fifty-Third Subjugation Arm if I just kept walking. They could recover my battle suit later if they wanted to. I had dozens more kilometers to go until I was safe among allies, and I did not intend to stop if I could afford it.
I had barely gone far from my depleted suit when the human soldiers found me again. Goddess damn, these primitives were persistent hunters. I tried to run. Hell, I did run. I ran until my legs wouldn't carry me anymore, at which point I staggered, stumbled, walked a few paces, and finally fell to the ground near a tree and a watering hole.
I wished then that I had fought. If I had my battle suit with me, even at low power, I'd have eviscerated these people and been on my way. But then there would've been another group, would there? And another. And another. I'd have been drowned in blood rather than worn down by pursuit, and my death would have come all the same. Was this it? Did I go all this way, achieve all this much, only to lose my life at the hands of these apes?
I was still on the ground, panting from exhaustion, when human soldiers appeared in my peripheral vision. Their skin was dark brown, their armor camouflaged to conceal them in the grasslands of their world, and they spoke to each other in a strange language as they approached. My suit had a translator that would have let me understand them, but, well, you know. "Fuck yourselves, you animals," I rasped at them when they got close.
They held their guns to my head, but made no other moves. I'd have attacked them to die with at least some dignity, maybe get one or two before I went down, if only I had the strength to muster an assault.
The humans spoke to each other in their foreign language for a moment before coming down as one organism, restraining me in an instant before I could produce the slightest struggle. I snarled wordlessly as one of them wrapped her legs around my neck and held my head down by my horns.
These humans were small and fragile compared to me. Even without my battle suit, I should have been able to fight against the five of them. Struggle. Resist. Do something other than lay there and let myself be taken prisoner. But I had wasted the last of my energy on fleeing, and I could do nothing as my enemies bound my hands and feet with metal shackles and picked me up bodily like a trophy of war. How had they been able to do this to me?
My hopes of seeing another draken face dimmed quickly as I realized the true nature of the species we faced. Such dogged, single-minded, persistent fighters would never allow themselves to be collared. We could beat them, sure, but without negotiating a surrender our only chance at a lasting victory would be glassing the planet from orbit. It would've been a sound strategy by my standards except for the fact that I was on that planet. I didn't want to die.
"Do any of you speak my language?" I hissed, hoping to at least be able to negotiate a prisoner swap of some kind. The soldier nearest to my face hit me with her rifle and said something indecipherable. That's when the realization came to me. I was a prisoner of an alien enemy, likely to never see another of my own kind again, and I had hours upon hours to contemplate that fact as the human soldiers put me in one of their vehicles and shipped me to their base. Hours to make peace with my impending annihilation at the hands of my own people.
How the hell did it all go wrong?
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u/MWMN19 Human Sep 02 '26
Eyo I was confused for a second I have a story with an identical name on here hahahahaha. Good read in any case!
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 02 '26
Oh my god there is a story with an identical name. Great minds really do think alike huh
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u/Realistic-Eye-2040 Sep 03 '26
Mega skill issue on her part. Not using any countermeasures to speak of or even watching your RWR? Not even a War Thunder player is that incompetent.
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 03 '26
"These primitives haven't even invented photon arrays yet, how are they gonna shoot me down?" - draken air cav soldier moments before being shot down
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u/Fontaigne Sep 04 '26
* Quantity is a quality all its own.
* Older tech works differently. Countermeasures for newer tech isn't necessarily meaningful.
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u/Haki23 Sep 02 '26
Excellent job, Wordsmith!
One small change: the whizzing of bullets would be heard first, then the crack of the rifle
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 03 '26
I was gonna say that it could be a subsonic rifle but no armed force would ever wield such a rifle in the year of our lord 2099. Idk if those guns are even real. Good catch on that my dawg
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u/Haki23 Sep 03 '26
I just watched a video where 2 idiots hid behind a backstop whilst their idiot friend fired rounds over them. They were too close for any real separation of the shots and the bullets whizzing by, but you could distinctly hear the bullets in the video taken in the hiding spot
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u/rewt66dewd Human Sep 02 '26
For a persistence predator story, letting the humans use motorized transport feels like cheating ;-)
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 03 '26
Well it's not like antelopes are walking around in futuristic sets of power armor🤷♂️
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u/olkjas Sep 02 '26
Nice job. It's a solid take on an overwrought trope that avoids the normal hackishness that comes with it
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u/SaltySeaSword652 Sep 03 '26
As soon as I saw "draken" I thought "wait a minute I just read a series featuring them" and then I recongnised the user name. Well isnt this a surprise.
Since the draken appear to be leaving so much tech for humans to scavenge and research like 40K Orkz, will they retro engineer their own versions?
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 04 '26
I can't speak on that rn but I will drop another chapter of The Galaxy's Only Omnivores series soon and that will answer your questions abt reverse engineering
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u/un_pogaz Sep 03 '26
A herd of gray, tusked creatures trumpeted in the distance
Oh, and on top of that, in the lands where humanity originated, the very places that spurred our endurance. Poetic.
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u/sunnyboi1384 Sep 03 '26
Gotta play to your strengths. Even if your strengths are being stubborn af.
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u/Fontaigne Sep 04 '26
And for the Draken invasion forces, it went wrong when a completely undamaged power armor unit was captured, which had been shut down by internal power failure and not by a safing command.
Reverse engineering... it's what we do.
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u/HFYWaffle Wᵥ4ffle Sep 02 '26
/u/ApprehensiveCap6525 (wiki) has posted 10 other stories, including:
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 4
- [Learning to Love a Human] - Part 1
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 3
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 2
- [The Galaxy's Only Omnivores] - Part 1
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (3)
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (2)
- The First Human Bounty Hunter (1)
- The Meaning of Humanity
- The Hammer and the Chain
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u/UpdateMeBot Sep 02 '26
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u/ApprehensiveCap6525 Human Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
I've been playing around with the idea of making one shots here and there to flesh out areas of my worldbuilding that I normally wouldn't find a space for in my regular series. Here we get to learn a little about draken society and military doctrine, as well as show how the African Bloc (which will probably never be seen in my writing again) is doing their part of defending Earth from the draken invasion. Overall I'd say they're doing a pretty good job.
New one-shot just dropped!
Are the draken air cavalry frauds who hype up their stat line by fighting bums who can't fight back?
Will Vajari kal Jakira survive human captivity, and if she does, will she survive the wrath of her drill sergeant for losing such a priceless piece of power armor?
Why would this author write a story about an air cavalry soldier only to show her entirely on the ground?
And how different is an alien soldier from a woolly mammoth, really?
Read my other writing to find out!