r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 1d ago

OC-Series [Let them eat cake] Chapter 9 - Abroad

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Chapter Nine – Aboard

Toriel knelt slowly, keeping her distance, the flashlight lowered fully now, so only a faint scatter of light lay between them. Hutor didn't move, but his faceted eyes tracked every one of her movements, sixfold, and she couldn't have said which of the six images in his mind was the important one at any given moment.

"I have a ship," she said, and gestured slowly in the direction she'd come from, hoping gestures were more universal than words. "Power. A medical module. You're not getting away from here otherwise."

He clicked, a short, halting sequence she couldn't read, but the tone, deeper, less questioning than his first sound, sounded like something close to a decision. He followed her, on unsteady legs, his six limbs barely coordinated after days of exhaustion, to the airlock of her small ship, where he hesitated a long moment before stepping through, as if weighing whether a second captivity was better or worse than certain death among the containers.

Aboard, Toriel had something the Merak outposts Hutor had dealt with so far lacked: modern translation technology, standard among the Hesh for decades, trained on hundreds of languages and designed to adapt to new, unknown sound patterns. It took hours, not days. She fed the system every click Hutor made, let it search for patterns, repetitions, context, while offering him water, then something resembling food for his physiology, and slowly, with every passing hour, pure noise became something that felt like the beginnings of a conversation.

What she heard then made her sit still for a while.

He told it to her in fragments at first, the translation still uncertain, individual terms missing that the system still had to work out — of the cliff burrow he'd been torn from, of the narrow pod, of a place where many of his kind were kept, not for labor, she understood that wrong at first, but for entertainment. Of ships that hunted them, among rock fragments, while others watched, applauded, placed bets on the outcome.

Toriel knew cruelty. She had grown up among a people who had spent centuries fearing exactly the kind of rule the Merak exercised over half the star systems. Slavery, exploitation, the cold calculus of an empire that understood life only as a resource. All of that she knew. All of that she'd read in reports, studied in archives, since she was old enough to understand the danger her own people had never quite managed to shake.

But this was something else. Slavery served a purpose, however cold and contemptuous of sentient life that purpose was — labor, resources, profit. What Hutor described served no purpose except the entertainment of those watching. Intelligent beings were hunted for pleasure, spectators allowed to applaud and bet, as if it were a sport like any other. She had never heard of anything like it, not in her people's archives, not in the warning reports she'd studied for years. It didn't fit the picture she'd formed of the Merak. An empire, brutal, greedy, but at least comprehensible in its brutality, calculable, an enemy whose logic one could understand, because it served a purpose.

This had no purpose. This was cruelty for its own sake, and that frightened her more than anything she'd known about the Merak so far.

She had already seen the horror before Toriel came. A neighboring sector, three systems over, from which rumors about the overseers had seeped to them the way everything seeped here, slowly, distorted, but never entirely wrong: an uprising over the last feed reserves, put down with a severity that was considered excessive even among the Merak, if the looks of the overseers who spoke of it could be believed. They had punished everyone, not just the rebels, a collective punishment of the kind known from old stories but rarely seen anymore, because it was uneconomical, because dead workers brought in no harvest. They had done it anyway.

Meva also knew what the Merak overseers didn't say aloud but let slip in whispers in their reports: the harvest on Kesh-Adar itself was shrinking, for two seasons running, and no one had an explanation that helped. She had learned to read the overseers' conversations like a book whose language she should never have learned, and what she read, she didn't like.

Toriel didn't notice her at first as a threat — that was her mistake, or her luck, depending on how it was told later. Meva saw her at the spare parts depot, opening crates, one after another, with a care too precise for someone who only wanted to deliver. She wasn't counting the parts. She was checking the guard routes along the depot walls, with a gaze that lingered too long on the blind spots between patrol paths, too briefly on the spare parts themselves.

Meva knew that look. She'd never seen it on anyone else, but she recognized at once what it meant: this woman wasn't here to deliver something. She was here to take something, or to see what could be taken.

A pirate, Meva thought. She'd heard of such — rarely, in hints whispered when no overseer was near. Ships from beyond the borders that came when control slackened, taking what they could find without concerning themselves with the Merak. People spoke of them with a mixture of fear and, less often admitted, a kind of envy.

She waited until Toriel was alone, truly alone, none of the false solitudes rarely found in a system like this one, and then stepped out of the depot wall's shadow.

"You're counting the wrong things," she said.

Toriel spun around, her hand a moment too quick toward her side, where a weapon presumably sat, then calm again, controlled. "What are you trying to say."

"You haven't opened any crate twice. But you've watched the guard change at the north gate three times." Meva held her gaze, without fear, which surprised even herself. "I know where the gaps are. Where the controls haven't run right for months. Where you can get through without anyone reporting it, because nobody reports what they see anymore."

Toriel said nothing, but she didn't say no either, which Meva took as answer enough.

"That's worth more than any spare part," Meva said. "I'll give it to you. In exchange, you take me with you when you go."

She expected no kindness, no false promises. She'd never expected that in this system and wouldn't expect it from a stranger either. She offered a trade, the way she'd learned to with Draeon, only this time the price wasn't a rounded-up harvest scale but the only coin she still had: a life she now knew more about than those who ruled it.

Toriel studied her a long time, with a look too calculating for a simple pirate, had Meva been in any position to recognize that difference yet. But she couldn't, not now, not in this moment, and so she heard only the answer that mattered.

"Show me the gaps," Toriel said. "Then we'll talk about the rest."

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u/Chamcook56 1d ago

The unfolding of your story is well done. Expanding the plot with new characters, well presented with a tease of backstory so as not confuse this older reader. It will be good to see the the Peoples if the universe rise against the fascist lizards. Carry on.

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u/UpdateMeBot 1d ago

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u/Daseagle Alien Scum 1d ago

Maybe "however cold and contemptuous of humanity that purpose was" needs another synonym? Since humans aren't in the picture - yet.

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u/lazy_yellow_lizard 1d ago

Thank you! Good catch — I’ve fixed it now.