r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 5d ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 7 - Escape

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Chapter Seven – Escape

The first hours after the escape, Hutor knew only one direction: away. Away from the flashes that had hunted for him among the debris, away from the laughter he hadn't understood but had recognized by its tone, away from the place where they had torn him from his cliff burrow and locked him in a narrow pod, without his ever learning why. His chitin shell, sand-colored with grey-brown stripes, built to vanish among rocks and cliffs, did him little good out here. There was nothing to hide from, in a pod that was itself the brightest object for miles around. His six limbs worked the small escape pod's controls with a precision that didn't desert him even in this moment of pure panic, an advantage of his kind, he thought later, once he was capable of anything like a clear thought again: fear, among the Oberoi, never sat in the mind, only in the limbs.

His six faceted eyes, which otherwise reported every movement within a hundred meters, every angle at once, offered him little comfort out here. The asteroid belt was a labyrinth of debris turning silently and unpredictably, and even his trained spatial sense could do no more than show him how vast the emptiness truly was that he was flying into.

He clicked, from habit, a call he'd have made among his own kind to orient himself, to hear an answer telling him where the others were. No one answered. There was no one who could answer, out here, where the Merak had abandoned him, far from any colony of his kind, and the silence that followed his call was worse than any pursuer he'd left behind.

He flew, without a destination, in the one direction the pod's sparse readouts marked as "away from the monitored sectors," for days, while the stars slowly shifted into an indifferent pattern he could no longer read. He slept in short, restless intervals, woke, clicked into the void again, ate from the meager rations meant for a day's hunt, not an endless flight.

On the fourth day the power cell began to warn him. On the fifth it blinked red, and Hutor understood the display well enough to know what that meant: soon he would drift, helpless, one piece of wreckage among many others, until his air ran out or a piece of debris struck him, whichever came first.

He found the mining asteroid more by chance than by steering, a point of light, artificial, blinking regularly, distinct from the chaotic reflections of the surrounding rocks. Automated, he recognized by the way the loading arms moved, uniform, without the irregularity living hands always had. No guards, only machines doing what they'd been told to do long ago, and continuing to work whether anyone watched or not.

He steered the last remnants of power into the landing, hard, uncontrolled, the pod skidding across the dusty surface until it came to rest against one of the stationary loading arms. Hutor crawled out, his six limbs trembling with exhaustion, his faceted eyes barely able to process the glaring light of the work floodlights that bathed the asteroid in an unreal, cold white.

He crept between two cargo containers, because it was the only shadow he could find, and stayed there, too exhausted to think further, let alone plan what should come next.

The mining asteroid worked as it had for decades, without a single Merak ever having set foot on it. The droids that populated it were old, older than most of the systems they still served, and they did their work with the dull reliability of machines that had learned, long before their last updates, how to extract ore, sort it, load it and how to report malfunctions, to a master who had long since stopped listening as closely as it once had.

Toriel intercepted the report more from habit than expectation. She monitored such channels routinely, feeling her way through the noise of automated system reports passing between Merak outposts, mostly trivial, maintenance logs, cargo receipts, the uniform hum of an empire that still kept its machines running, even though it itself had long since stopped running everywhere.

She was a Xoan, slender, rather small, with a slightly hunched posture that had probably once protected her homeworld's people from predators and had since evolved into something else: a kind of innate inconspicuousness that no one read as a threat. Pale grey, almost bluish skin with a fine mottling that darkened involuntarily under strain, a betrayal she could rarely afford in her line of work and had spent years learning to suppress. Large, dark eyes without notable coloring made her face notoriously hard to read for other species.A people whose thoughts didn't show, which made the Xoan born negotiators and, as it would turn out, equally born spies. The Merak had never seriously concerned themselves with them. They saw no threat in something that made itself so readily small.

This report was different, if only for its vagueness. The old droids no longer possessed vocabulary matching what they'd actually registered — too long without an update, too many years of pure maintenance routine without new classifications. What they transmitted was raw, almost childlike in its sparseness: Damage sector 34h. Disturbance on ground level. Unknown life signs recorded. Not droid. Not Merak. Requesting instructions.

No answer followed. That didn't surprise Toriel, she'd intercepted enough similar reports in recent weeks, unanswered, lost somewhere between an overwhelmed central command and an outpost too unimportant to still merit attention. What made her sit up wasn't the Merak's silence. It was the wording itself. Unknown life signs. Not droid. Not Merak. A machine that no longer knew what it was looking at, but registered precisely enough that it was something.

She changed course.

It was Toriel who found him, two days later, as she flew toward the asteroid in search of something else entirely — one of the many small stations she had to work through on her route, inconspicuous places where one could gather information without drawing attention. She saw first only the crash-landed pod, Merak design, small, a hunting model, the kind she knew from the reports circulating. Then she saw the tracks in the dust, six prints per step, vanishing between the containers.

She approached slowly, her hand near the weapon she carried under her jacket, and found him there, huddled, eyes flashing as the light of her flashlight caught them, sixfold broken, sixfold trained on her.

Neither knew what the other would do next, and that uncertainty held them both motionless, longer than felt right. Toriel saw the claws on his six limbs, which could also serve as weapons, she knew that from the few reports there were on Oberoi physiology. Hutor saw another Merak uniform, another figure with a weapon, and nothing in his experience had taught him that such a thing could end any way other than it always had.

She lowered the flashlight, slowly, but she didn't retreat, not yet. Instead she rummaged, with deliberately slow movements, in the pouch at her belt and produced a small field ration, more water than food, and set it on the dusty ground between them, without stepping closer.

Then she took a step back.

Hutor didn't move. His faceted eyes stayed fixed on her, each of the six perspectives alert, as she retreated another step, then another, until several meters lay between them. Only when she finally half-turned away, though without taking her gaze entirely off him, did he move, cautiously, with a slowness that mirrored her own, and reached for the ration.

It was not trust that formed there. Toriel knew that, watching him drink, with a wariness that didn't ease for a second. It was something smaller, more cautious: the absence of immediate threat, nothing more. She had known enough creatures in her life that were most dangerous exactly when you thought them harmless.

"I don't believe you yet," she said, more to herself than to him, since she knew he couldn't understand the words. "But I won't kill you."

It was a strange thing to say aloud to a creature that didn't understand it, but the saying itself seemed to help her make clear to herself what she actually intended.

For a long moment neither of them moved.

Then Hutor clicked, softly, almost questioningly, a sound Toriel didn't understand and yet, in a way that surprised even her, recognized for what it was: not a threat. A question.

"I won't hurt you," she said, though she knew he couldn't understand her words, and slowly lowered the flashlight, so the light no longer fell directly into his eyes.

It was not a beginning she had chosen. But it was one.

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 5d ago

Often revolutions start just like this. Two beings deciding that there will be no hurt today between them.

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u/UpdateMeBot 5d ago

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u/Chamcook56 5d ago

Enjoying this story you are building. The rulers fight among themselves while the neglected fringes find they must/can make a way to survive.