Weekly Drabble #250: The Last Angel - Pets (Patreon)

This week's prompt is 'i wonder if these make for good pets' from Ranged. This story kind of went places. It went from a Naiad toying with a ship, a Naiad toying with a ship over a longer period of time, to Sammuramat and one of the objects of her study, to shifting perspective a little bit to said objects. Will there be more? Time will tell. In the meantime, enjoy!

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Pets:

Caitlin Colby used her elbow to smash the casing over the fire extinguisher, grabbing it and spraying down the sparking flames at the rear of Sky Spider’s bridge. A power conduit damaged by spalling metal fragments had started the fire, quickly overwhelming the ventilation systems with noxious black smoke. As she dosed the flames, she hastily wiped blood out of her eye. She’d been hit by the same burst of metal that had damaged the bridge, and her left temple was bleeding profusely. Despite that, she knew the injury wasn’t that bad. Head wounds always bled like a motherfucker. She’d been lucky.

Two of her crew hadn’t been; Santimin Osen-Pala, their Didact Scopes officer had taken several pieces of shrapnel to the upper body. A metal splinter the size of her pinky finger was still wedged in his right eye, and his throat had been ripped out by another.

Their comm officer, Xavine Yanloladaughter had had to be hauled to sickbay, her left arm all but severed at the elbow. Caitlin didn’t want to think about the crew below the bridge. She hoped no one – or, at least only a very few people – had been in those sections. Anyone who’d been in the mass round’s path from the outer hull to the ship’s central core would be dead. No luck allowed for them. Physics didn’t give a shit about luck.

“Enemy status?” she shouted to be heard over the alarms. Sky Spider was taking a beating. The small raider’s screens had collapsed, two-thirds of its weapons were offline or outright destroyed, half its augur arrays were in the same condition and its outer hull more resembled a moth-eaten coat than armour.

“His screens are back up,” Calvin, Caitlin’s twin brother, belted from the Tactical station. “But he’s still bleeding air.”

“Good,” Caitlin said, as she dropped the spent extinguisher. That he was venting at all meant they’d cut through the outer hull. If it were anyone else, she might have guessed that their opponent just hadn’t bothered to depressurize the outer decks, but the twins’ ‘father’ wasn’t a stupid man. If Thunderous Hoof hadn’t managed to lock down a hull breach, then they’d bitten him deep.

For all the good it had done. Thunderous Hoof was three times Sky Spider’s size and almost five times the raider’s mass. As soon as the bulk cruiser had appeared on scopes, the siblings had known that their escape had failed. At first, they’d even hoped that it was that thing again – the thing they didn’t talk about except to each other and hardly even then, but it wasn’t. Instead of a shimmer on sensors or a disappearing and reappearing ship, it had been Jivek’s sigil vessel.

We were so close. But again, Jivek Kiinil wasn’t a stupid man. He’d figured out that the ‘parts run’ his ‘children’ were leading was actually an attempt to get away from him and his Unbound “family”. He’d come to collect his wayward employees. Not just employees; the Unbound lord considered Calvin and Caitlin his adopted offspring. For the longest time, they’d been just that, accepting their ‘father’s’ harsh discipline and getting inducted into his greater family of the crime syndicate he ran here in the Kaedan Vault. They both had scars – of all kinds – from growing up like that. It had been Calvin that had started to question things first.

Caitlin had almost turned him in to their father. Not maliciously, but for his own good. So that Jivek could answer all his questions and clear the air. The Pedlar might not be of the same species as his ‘children’, but he’d looked after them when no one else would, when their own parents had abandoned them. He’d told the story a hundred times, usually when he was angry and wanted the twins to remember what he’d done for them. I hauled you out of a dumpster. A dumpster! You’d been left there naked and bawling like trash and Shaaki’v – he wanted to eat the pair of you, thought you were just some vermin, but I knew what you were! I took you in and raised you like my own pups, didn’t I?

There’d always been questions, questions that Caitlin had tried to ignore and tried to get her brother to do the same, but he couldn’t. He’d spent years cataloguing every little inconsistency in the stories about how the twins came to be Kiinil’s children, every sideways glance and muttered breath. Caitlin had done her best to stop him, or at least keep their ‘father’ from finding out, but Calvin hadn’t listened to her. He just kept looking, even going behind her back at times.Eventually, he got a lead. He didn’t say how or where, but Caitlin hadn’t needed him to. She knew what he was capable of.

Everyone said Caitlin was the harder of the two, but they underestimated Calvin badly when they did. He could go just as far as his sibling. Farther, even. They’d learned long ago not to let anyone know that and played up the differences between the siblings’ personalities. Jivek had known, but he’d never said a word, often silently smirking at his ‘childrens’’ performance. He’d been proud of how Caitlin and Calvin manipulated those around them.

Well, we learned from the best.

The lead Calvin had found was a name:‘Cooper’. It was their family name. There weren’t that many Broken in the galaxy and even fewer off Rally. Calvin had traced that name back to a Maria and Franklin Cooper from Breveka Colony and from there, he’d gotten more. Right down to the security logs from the Unbound raid on Breveka.

Calvin had wanted to watch it with Caitlin, but she’d adamantly refused and left him to view it alone. When she came back, they’d argued. Him, insisting that she needed to see what he’d found. Her, adamant that it didn’t matter and he should leave the past alone. She’d been worried about him; he’d gone too far. Jivek was bound to notice everything he’d been up to. She didn’t know if she could protect him from their father once he found out what Calvin had been doing. He’d turned his back on her and walked away. He hadn’t said anything and for a pair of siblings who often finished each other’s sentences, that had hurt more than anything else.

Alone in the house with only the residue of the fight weighing on her and a horrible curiousity gnawing at her, Caitlin had given in. To see for herself what could possibly be so bad, to prove to Calvin that nothing he’d found really mattered that much. So she’d watched the tapes. Afterwards, he’d had to stop her from destroying the family home.

They hadn’t been thrown away like garbage. They’d been put there to hide them from the Unbound ransacking the colony. From the view of a street camera, Caitlin had seen her father, her real father, clutching a pair of terrified infants to his chest as he limped through a filthy alley, one of his legs dragging behind him. His head snapped back and forth, looking for someplace to hide, but there wasn’t any. The recording had no sound, so Caitlin could only imagine what he’d been heard that made him realize he couldn’t escape.

At least, at first. She found out soon enough. The only place to hide had indeed been a small dumpster, too small for the man to climb into. Carefully, giving each infant a last kiss goodbye, he tucked them inside and started to limp away, leading his pursuers away from his children. He didn’t get far, as a pair of xien hounds ran into view.

Morad, Jevik’s second in command, kept a pair of xien with him at all times. He used them to administer discipline or for sport. On the tape, Caitlin saw them lunge for her father. He was quick. He had something in his hand, a piece of debris and swung it, catching the first in the head. The animal went down, twitching pitifully. The second latched onto him, mauling his arm and bearing him to the ground. Morad appeared, looking at his dying pet and turning to the bleeding Franklin, brutally stomping and kicking him, but leaving him alive. As the camera continued to roll, Jivek came up the alley, Shaaki’v in tow. He put a hand on Morad’s shoulder to comfort him as the remaining hound tore at Franklin’s guts.

There were other records, too. Autopsies and videos recovered from the bodies of fallen Unbound. Some of those detailed what had happened to Maria Franklin. This one in particular had been taken from a dead Unbound, a... personal record of his activities during the colony raid, ended with an Enforcer’s bullet. There’d been enough on it, though. More than enough.

At the outset of the raid, Maria Cooper had been captured by the raiders. Some of the “family” wanted to see what a Broken woman was like. Jivek watched and laughed, him and his immediate staff joking about the ‘degeneracy’ of some Unbound or making sickening comments about Maria’s “skill”. When his men were done, one asked to keep her as a pet.

At that, the Pedlar elbowed the other Unbound aside and put a bullet in the woman’s head. A twist is fine once, but I won’t have animal-fuckers on my crew, he’d said. And I’m not paying for a whore’s upkeep.

He’d killed their parents. He’d let their father be torn to pieces. He’d watched their mother be raped and then killed her for it. Caitlin had been enraged and Calvin had only barely been able to hold her back from storming into the clan’s compound and going for their ‘father’s’ throat. As she’d screamed and raged in his arms, his voice had been a low whisper in her ear, cold and deadly. We play this smart, he’d told her. We don’t let him know. We find anyone else who wants out from under his boot. We build up a group. We plan. We get away. That’s important. If we’re here, we’re dead. Like you said, he’ll find out. So we get away first and then... then we come back when we want and pay him back for everything he’s ever done. Every slap, every cut, every bruise and broken bone. We show ‘daddy’ how grateful we are for all he’s done for us.

Panting and crying in her brother’s grip, the sheer hate in his voice had broken through Caitlin’s red fog. Everyone thought Calvin was the weaker of the two. The soft-spoken one, the one that would shy away from fights, but they were wrong. They didn’t know him like Caitlin did. “Yeah,” she agreed, letting her fury fade out with each breath. They weren’t going to forget. They weren’t going to forgive. Jivek Kiinil was going to pay for what he’d done to them. “He’s going-”

“-to pay,” Calvin finished. “He will, but we do this smart-”

“-and we do it right.” The pair of them were back in sync. “Okay,” Caitlin agreed. She could do this. It went against every instinct in her body, but with Calvin she could handle it. Together, they could do anything. ‘Father’ hadn’t taught them that lesson; they’d learned it on their own.

First, though – first they had to get away before he found out what they knew.

Second... second was revenge.