Trying To Get By Ch. 01

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TaLtos6
TaLtos6
1,930 Followers

The rescuers killed the two remaining survivors and then set to mapping the planet properly, locating and designating as many of the mineral deposits of any worth back home as well as locating the major population centers.

It took some years.

During that time her father had begun to study the humans here and quite without meaning to, through his actions, his race had learned that it was possible to mate with them. He'd met and grown a love with a female of this world.

Subsequent to that discovery came the knowledge that conception could occur from the mating – which was how H'Yan-Ah had come to be. Her mother had been brought to this vessel when she'd gone into her labour because it offered some protection where they'd be left alone, since it had been deserted for a time by then.

There were issues.

H'Yan-Ah's mother had not survived the labour, being the issue which was perhaps the most significant to H'Yan-Ah herself. As well, her father's role in the crew was about the only thing which had saved him from the wrath of the rest of them for a time. Hours after her birth, he'd taken H'Yan-Ah to the home of her human grandparents and they raised her until about the age of eleven.

The purpose had been to give her a home where she might be loved and taught, since her father had learned that there was a tendency in her mother, an ability to bend some physical laws which he'd hoped that their child had inherited. Her mother's family were known and a little feared for it among the humans – when they weren't sought after for the very same ability.

The ability was exceedingly rare and was known among the humans as 'magic' along with some other names for it, since they had no way to explain it. Beyond that had come H'Yan-Ah's other gift from her mother, a tendency to be able to send and receive thoughts as a way to communicate wordlessly – which had been the thing that had allowed the two widely different individuals to talk in the first place.

So little H'Yan-Ah had spent most of the years of her childhood with a pair of humans which were for the most part somewhat shunned by their peers in the tribe, but at least she knew her father because he came to see her when he could. He taught her his kind's way of speaking, but she had trouble with it, since her mouth was not the correct shape. She did learn and could speak it, and it sounded odd to her father, though he'd never minded it.

Mostly, they'd talked with their minds, once the young girl learned how it could be done in her head. Words and sounds and how they were made were unimportant then. The way that things were pronounced was forgotten then. Only outward thoughts were needed.

Thoughts come from the mind, but the way of thinking them is often as universal, slightly visceral ones, formed in the mind of the originator, but driven by the soul and as such, they radiate outward like radio waves. H'Yan-Ah was like a transceiver, able to find and receive thoughts, able as well to send once the tuning had been matched.

What she'd wanted from the first – as soon as she'd learned that most other children had a similar desire – was a friend her own age. She'd have settled happily for anyone, but it never happened for her. Her grandparents lived too far away from where anyone else lived and she'd been very lonely there.

Outside of her grandparent's clan and the reserve where they lived, human society lived among the hallmarks of it's culture, while tribes such as H'Yan-Ah's grandparents' lived as well as they could in their own, taking some elements of the larger culture as they could.

One time - the one which had also been the last visit - her father had found H'Yan-Ah to be ill but recovering quickly from an illness which could be called an epidemic among the humans at the time there. Her grandparents had died from it one after the other the previous day. They'd done all that they could to help her and been successful at the cost of their own lives.

He stayed with his daughter and he buried their bodies as H'Yan-Ah tearfully gathered up the things that she wanted. They'd lived in a cave far from the nearest village and H'Yan-Ah's father had sealed the opening in a way that his daughter could control, should she ever need to return there.

After that, H'Yan-Ah spent her adolescence among the others of her father's kind. It had not gone well there either.

To them, she was something which was not meant to be. There were other young ones there and she had to take a lot of abuse from them all, especially the boys. Her father did as he could, but he couldn't prevent all of it. His daughter found no friends there.

When she did finally defend herself out of fear and desperation, using the only talent that the others did not also possess, she nearly killed two young males.

For that, she graduated from only being ignored and shunned by the adults to being exiled – along with her father. They went to the older crashed vessel and lived there, where she learned everything that he could teach her.

And a lot of that had been concerned with the operation and maintenance of the vessel as he repaired it.

Some years later, they guessed that the mapping mission must have been completed, since the newer vessel left the planet without informing her father, his particular tasking being handled by everyone else to varying degrees by then, since they'd all learned it over the time.

He'd said that it didn't matter much, since he was certain that if he came up in the meetings after they returned to their world, he'd likely be villianized as the cause of as much of the misfortune as they could make him.

And anyway, he'd said with his kind of smile, he'd stolen copies of what they'd brought back every time that they'd returned before leaving again for the next part of it. All that had been missing was data regarding the world's polar regions and he knew that there was little of interest there. Everything else had already been loaded into their ship's navigation and data systems.

One of the few saving graces in all of it had been the incompatibility of the first vessel's fuel cells with those of the second one. They were of a type which was adequate and long-lasting enough to power a smaller exploratory vessel for a very long time depending on distance travelled.

For larger craft such as the other one, they were not made in the necessary size at all and could not be used in conjunction with the newer kind. Apparently, the idea of augmenting one's fuel cells with those of another craft had never occurred to the designers, for which H'Yan-Ah was very grateful, since given her present usage rate, she expected to expire long before they ever would, and though she had no idea as to her life expectancy, she knew that her father's kind lived for a long time.

When she was a little older, recognising what was within their kind, H'Yan-Ah's father had used the early signs that his daughter would be fertile soon to go exploring. He returned every time after a sufficient period had elapsed, calling her in his mind to check beforehand, since he knew that she would be 'listening' for him.

It went on for a time until one evening, he didn't call, and by then, H'Yan-Ah had known anyway for two reasons.

Her systems had reported that they were receiving a beacon signal from quite a distance off. She hurriedly began preparations to go to the point of origin. But only minutes before leaving in the quad rotorcraft she suddenly stopped and sank slowly to her knees, feeling it at the instant that her father died.

It took her a time to get up on her feet again and there were tears in her eyes as she did. But it changed her preparations for the journey that night.

Her father had not been quite as large as most males of his kind, and his daughter's physical stature reflected that, though an observer who was not familiar with her genetic makeup would likely never know anything other than the markings on her skin if they were visible and not hidden under clothing.

She didn't share that many physical features with them, to tell the truth of it. Some details aside, the alien part of her heritage wasn't very visible at first glance in her face, or her limbs themselves, and she didn't need what most of them required to live here on this world.

H'Yan-Ah had never considered it but outwardly, she was taller than most of the human females on the planet and a good deal of the males as well. Around here, she was the tallest female, hands down. It still made her undersized to the males of her father's kind, but that didn't matter. They'd all ignored her as she was growing up.

She wasn't as tall as the largest human male that she'd ever seen in her life. That didn't matter either and here, at a bit over six feet, she was taller than the majority of them.

She was stronger than they were; a good deal stronger, thanks to her father.

She stopped stumbling in grief and strode quickly to one set of lockers. Opening it, she began to remove and set out the clothing that she'd want for this before removing what she had on at the moment.

It was a little odd that there was one thing in that chamber which was not original, something else that her father had actually made just for her. She stepped over to it and actuated the thing to regard her reflection as it came into view.

H'Yan-Ah looked fairly human for a young woman – if you allowed for the long, thick braids in her black hair and the coloured beads that she usually wove into them at intervals. She looked not all that far off the norm for a female of this place – well, one of the sorts, she guessed.

Her skin tone was a bit dark for around here, though in some other places on this planet it wasn't unusual at all. She'd never been to one of those places, though. The rest of her, on her back mostly, she had a pattern of small, dark dots of varying sizes, something like a reptile, though it wasn't what she was at all. They changed a little into bands which faded out the closer to her front that one looked; it was just another thing which came to her from her father. Like the fact that she didn't have nails on her fingers and her toes.

She had short retractable claws there.

The pigmentation dots gave her a bit of an orange tinge where they were visible except for the ones that were there around the edges of her face which was why she'd usually worn a garment that she'd made herself which was very much like a loose-fitting hooded sweatshirt if she had to be where there were humans. Because it hid most of her features along with the rough cloth pants that she'd made, they were her favourite things to wear if she had to deal with the locals.

But she didn't need to wear those things that night.

She looked at where she'd laid the things that she would wear. The pieces went on best in a certain order and they fit her well – armour that her father had fitted to her once she'd come into her own.

The last pieces were not armour specifically. They just connected to housings at the top of each shoulder at the rear over the upper shoulder b. Finally, she put on the headpiece. It was a masked helmet of a kind as well as a set of HUDs – Heads-Up Displays. With it in place, she looked at what she wore on her left forearm, scanning the status indicators to see that everything was connected and functioning and most importantly, matched what the displays in her helmet showed.

She retracted the weapons on her shoulders then, closed the locker, and strode to the lower bay.

She'd gone to recover what she could of her father's gear though it could be said that she wasn't in the best place for something like that in her heart. The rotorcraft roared a little noisily along at high speed in the darkness, it's shape cloaked with no lights on. H'Yan-Ah had her father's well-developed night vision anyway and by that point, she really could have cared less about any noise that her vehicle might be making.

When she'd gotten a little near the beacon, H'Yan-Ah slowed and shut the vehicle off after setting it down. She activated the blackout feature of her armour and then cloaked herself as well. With a look at the direction to the beacon as displayed on her bracer, she ran off that way.

What she saw as she crept forward some minutes later were several men in some kind of matching uniforms trying to remove her father's armour from his body.

She strode forward, angry then as she drew her double-ended blade. No one saw her come. Some of them only had a sense that they were no longer alone with the body of a beast.

She took her vengeance as cruelly as she knew how, having seen the way that her father had been pierced by many projectiles before he'd passed.

The last one must have been a little brighter than the others, because he ran off and looking at where he was going, she saw maybe twenty more on their way toward her, holding light sources up to see where they were going. The one who'd run was still in sight though far off after a few moments, still staying on the road as the ones that he'd passed called out to him to come back. Her shoulder-mount weapons took him and she was done.

While the newcomers were hunkered down, wondering what was going on, H'Yan-Ah fought back her feelings as she hurriedly stripped the armour from her father's corpse and turned to go, but not before she armed a grenade set for an interval of about half a minute and placed it in her father's hand, curling his fingers around it to cover the dull glow that showed that it was active. When it detonated, it would remove any signs that one of them had been there at all – as well as anyone inside a radius of about seven meters.

She looked back only once to see that the men had gotten to the place where the body lay and stood looking for her. She turned her head away then and squinted her eyes, not wanting to have the flash ruin her night vision when it came.

She did not have long to wait and made her way back to her rotorcraft as quickly as she could.

In the time since, she'd managed to start the vessel and had flown it to another place farther north from where she'd been born.

She lived alone, still finding things of interest to learn from the ship's systems. She'd managed to repair and improve her father's armour, adjusting it so that it fit her well, though she'd never had the need to wear it over the past year. Other than that, she'd spent quite a lot of time working at improving her level of fitness and learning about her weapons, since what had been brought along had not been touched by the original crew after leaving their home.

In the time since her landing here, the surrounding woods had grown very quickly to where the craft was now hidden by a great deal of new-growth forest in which H'Yan-Ah placed an overriding sense of foreboding and doom backed up with traps of a fatal sort. No one went there anyway, the nearest of the paths which led over the mountain pass being far away. The growth had been natural, though she'd helped quite a bit several times using the ability that she'd gotten from her mother.

She'd gone to the nearest human town a few times since then, just after a few staples that she'd needed such as spices and a little wine. Her grandparents had told her where they had a sack of money hidden and she was very frugal with it after she'd gone back to their cave to retrieve it before leaving.

One time quite recently, she'd heard a rumour being passed which sounded curious to her and she'd stopped not far off to listen in, drifting away a bit not long afterwards, since by then, she could 'listen' in her mind anyway, having felt enough of the speakers to be able to pull the conversation out of the babble.

It was something about a stranger who'd recently come to live in the town; someone who had no visible means of support, though she managed to live on nothing, apparently. It was said that the one looked different, like someone who did not belong. There was a little more; something that one of the Indians from the neighbouring tribe had spoken of; something about a being known as a 'fire demon' having been seen. The whole area was very quietly buzzing about it. For a moment, H'Yan-Ah thought that they might have been speaking about her – until that fire demon thing had come up.

She thought about it as she'd made her way home on foot. She had no real idea about just how she could even learn more about it, other than lurk around listening to what seemed like unlikely gossip more than anything. She even tried again but after two more trips into the town in one week and the way that she stood out a little due to her height, she noticed that she'd begun to attract some attention herself and withdrew without learning anything more.

The way that the tongues in the town spoke of this being told her that more than likely all of it was a pile of dung and that was about all. What began to bother her more was the possibility that there was someone living in the area who might be in need of some help soon and might possibly be of a kind who was also more than a little removed from the usual sort of people around there.

Then she wondered why she ought to care at all.

After thinking on it some more, she decided that she was rather well prepared for the coming winter and maybe there was someone in this who might need a friend soon. It probably wouldn't do her a bit of good to help, but she decided slowly that over her life, people like these idiots won more often than they lost. Worse, people who stood accused of most anything by a mob usually lost every time.

At best, she thought, it might be possible to help in some way if she could and after that, she could always drop the person off somewhere else if that was what they wanted.

She almost went back to not caring then, not seeing that helping could ever do anything for her. But she slowly came around back to at least wanting to learn more. If she could do anything positive, at least it might make her a half-decent memory for a while – like when she could have had a friend.

The scene at the lake came back to her as she sat thinking. Who had it been out there alone on the ridge?

She'd gone over the recording many times and she was certain at the end of all of it that whoever it was, they weren't completely human, not by a long shot. She wondered if the one that she'd seen was the one that the townspeople were talking about. Given the size and sparse population of the place, H'Yann-Ah guessed that there had to be a better than even chance that she was.

She walked to one of the system displays and accessed the database of civilisations known to her father's kind, narrowing down to the bipedal types.

It took her a while, selecting several and then learning what she could of them all. She looked for visuals and found many, narrowing and drilling down until she had what she guessed was the likely one – or at least the closest one to what she'd seen, anyway.

They had some famous warriors among them, but not many, even among only their own kind. But they were known in some sectors as intelligent and a certain percentage – as many as 20 percent - one in five people by what she read – possessed at least some telepathic ability as well as another, more startling ability which was common to most and was the basis for what they were known as in many places.

She accessed the environmental monitoring software and looked at the present conditions. High wind warnings, mentions made of possible wind damage to property and record cold temperatures for this area forecasted overnight, snow ...

And probably colder snow, a lot of much colder snow.

She stood up and walked to the lower bay, wondering if she was going to do this.

Even if she could find that person, H'Yan-Ah doubted that they could communicate very well between them, if at all. Even if she could find her, she'd probably need to spend the night doing her best to keep that individual from losing her mind.

TaLtos6
TaLtos6
1,930 Followers
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