Bramble (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bramblepatch) wrote2020-08-14 03:30 pm
bramblepatch) wrote2020-08-14 03:30 pm
Entry tags:
Original Fiction: Singing the Jetsam Blues
(Crossposted from Patreon, SFW, 1380 words, Gen. Content warnings: careless handling of a corpse, children in peril.
Another Unlikely Uncertainty tale, as voted on by my patreon supporters - that means that this is in continuity with both The Stranger Who Sojourns With You and We're Young And We're Bored, if you're keeping track (although it takes place slightly before either of the previous stories.
A very big thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and to everyone who generously gives my little stories their time and attention - you guys are great, and I hope you enjoy this story about a scavenging space-mermaid.)
Astal hadn’t known what to expect, when they’d found the distress signals in the void. It would take more effort than they particularly wanted to expend just now to interpret the content of the signals – the beacon was clear enough, a short loop thrumming with the kind of encoding that many of the atmosphere-dependent species in this part of the universe used in their ship-to-ship communications, but the siren would need to use some kind of artificial receiver to decode them. And Astal knew where to find such a thing, of course, they had one stashed away in their nest. But going and getting the device and listening to the broadcast properly seemed like a waste of effort, when the signal was strong enough that it must have been coming from nearby.
There were inhabited planets and moons nearer the center of this system. Nice ones, Astal understood, whatever that meant when applied to hot, bright rocks with crushing gravity and choking thick atmospheres. The sturdy little beings that liked that sort of thing didn’t often come out into the asteroid fields and dust clouds at the edges of the system, and when they did, most of them avoided the inhabited regions. The ones that ventured into the areas where Astal and their kind lived were usually heavily fortified, or rival scavengers… or desperate and doomed.
The armored and armed spacecraft were more than enough to send an exosiren fleeing. The rivals, scrappers and mining operations, were liable to shoot as well, if they weren’t one of the small number that were not in fact rivals but sometime partners. Astal could deal with rivals if they needed to, although interfering with a ship’s navigation sensors without proper reconnaissance was a risk. But the third possibility, the ships that couldn’t or wouldn’t return to more hospitable ports, well. That was enough to draw Astal out, if cautiously.
So they followed the distress signal, and came upon the pair of tiny spacecraft just as the saucers were starting to drift apart from each other.
Astal pounced on the nearest golden capsule – a silent one, the lights along the outside guttering out. As soon as their hands closed over it, they could feel that most of the craft’s internal systems had shut down already. Fine cracks crazed over one side of the semi-transparent shield that covered the top – Astal couldn’t tell whether the damage was caused by an attack or simply an impact with one of the nearby asteroids, but either way, the tiny form beneath the shield drifted, motionless, and Astal could smell leaked atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, in the near-vacuum. Eagerly, they grasped the body of the saucer in one hand and the damaged shield in the other, and twisted it open.
Bits of spacecraft and the lifeless body of the pilot drifted free. Astal was starting to pick around in the inside of the saucer for the water tanks and fuel cell when one of the other saucers, floating so near the siren’s flank now that if Astal had turned too quickly they might have whipped it with their tail, started to cycle up its pitifully tiny engines.
Honestly, the siren had thought that both of the ships – too small for this far out, too delicate for the asteroid field – had been nonfunctional by the time they arrived. Tasting the buzz of radiation from the engines struggling to start, Astal had to amend that to all but nonfunctional. They dropped the dead saucer they’d been scavenging and turned and scooped the crippled one up instead. More carefully now, keeping their fingers clear of the engines.
The figures inside this one were still moving, and tiny, even in comparison to most airbreathers, even in comparison to the dead pilot of the previous craft. Big dark eyes in gray-green faces – Astal was familiar enough with graeys to be pretty sure both of these ones were juveniles. How odd.
Well, they had learned to interface with communications systems on graey vessels. Astal carefully rested the pads of a couple of antennae against the body of the saucer, tried a couple of frequencies until they found one that fit. At this range, there was no question of encoding anything, when they could just tap in directly to the communications hardware.
“Hello?” they said – their voice constructed of carefully distorted white noise. The graey children startled, and the bigger of the two lifted what appeared to be a tiny firearm directly at Astal’s face, making the siren wince back a little and quickly add, “No, don’t, you’ll lose your air.”
She lowered the pistol slightly, uncertainly, grasping the smaller graey to her side with her other hand.
“It talks, Mim,” the littler one said, almost too quietly for the communication system’s microphones to pick her up, and the one with the gun shushed her.
“Your engines won’t get you to the inner system from here,” Astal pointed out. “Where has your houseship gone?”
At the question, the smaller graey started making distressed noises, and the older one, Mim, jammed the pistol back into the belt of her jumpsuit and wrapped both of her arms around the little girl. She glared up through the shield – Astal was pretty sure that narrowed-eye expression was an aggressive one in graeys – and snapped, “What, so you can eat them too?”
“I’m not going to eat you,” Astal objected.
“You broke Dae’s disc right open,” the girl insisted.
Still cupping the craft in both hands, Astal twisted in place, turning so that their body and fins blocked the sight of the cracked-open saucer. “That was already a wreck,” they said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were both wrecked.”
They paused and then asked again, because it was so strange to see even an adult graey separated from her clan, let alone a child, “Where’s the rest of your family gone? I need to give you back.”
“No!” The objection came entirely too quickly, as the girl clutched at the smaller child. She seemed to take a moment to collect herself, and then a little more composed, repeated, “No, don’t.”
“It can eat them if it wants,” the smaller girl muttered.
“Xai, you can’t say that,” Mim scolded, glancing nervously up at Astal.
“Why? They hurt Grandmama and Aunty! They were gonna hurt Mama! That’s why she – why she sent us out here,” the child objected. “The monster can eat the houseship. Serves them right.”
“I’m not going to –“ Astal began to repeat themself, then paused. The reassurances didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of reassuring the children, and honestly, little Xai’s fierceness was kind of endearing. “It’s flattering that you think I could eat a houseship by myself? I don’t think I’d be able to get into it unless the hull was already breached.”
“Oh.” That seemed to take a little of the charge out of the little graey, who turned to hide her face again in her companion’s side.
“It’s our cousins anyway. We can deal with them when we’re old enough,” Mim declared.
Astal blinked slowly down at her. “You’ll need to get old enough first,” they pointed out, although they weren’t sure what the appropriate age to pursue what sounded like some kind of kinslaying revenge ploy would be. “You’ll suffocate before you get to an inhabited planet if I leave you here. I have friends – ship-people friends. Ones that aren’t graeys. Can I ask one of them to take you?”
Mim hesitated, perhaps still suspicious of the siren’s intentions, but she was sensible enough to accept Astal’s assessment of her situation. “Ok. No tricks though.”
“None,” Astal promised, considering who might be near enough to come take charge of the little graeys. The Typhoon had been working a wreckfield not far away, they were pretty sure; if any of their scavenger friends could be trusted with a pair of random children, it was the pair of gregariously pack-bond prone aliens that flew her. “Can you authorize an outgoing transmission for me? I’ll use your coms to hail my friend.”
“And if you do eat us, eat Mim first,” Xai piped up, as the older girl fussed with the com controls.
Astal waved a free antenna in exasperation. “I don’t eat people.”
Another Unlikely Uncertainty tale, as voted on by my patreon supporters - that means that this is in continuity with both The Stranger Who Sojourns With You and We're Young And We're Bored, if you're keeping track (although it takes place slightly before either of the previous stories.
A very big thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and to everyone who generously gives my little stories their time and attention - you guys are great, and I hope you enjoy this story about a scavenging space-mermaid.)
Astal hadn’t known what to expect, when they’d found the distress signals in the void. It would take more effort than they particularly wanted to expend just now to interpret the content of the signals – the beacon was clear enough, a short loop thrumming with the kind of encoding that many of the atmosphere-dependent species in this part of the universe used in their ship-to-ship communications, but the siren would need to use some kind of artificial receiver to decode them. And Astal knew where to find such a thing, of course, they had one stashed away in their nest. But going and getting the device and listening to the broadcast properly seemed like a waste of effort, when the signal was strong enough that it must have been coming from nearby.
There were inhabited planets and moons nearer the center of this system. Nice ones, Astal understood, whatever that meant when applied to hot, bright rocks with crushing gravity and choking thick atmospheres. The sturdy little beings that liked that sort of thing didn’t often come out into the asteroid fields and dust clouds at the edges of the system, and when they did, most of them avoided the inhabited regions. The ones that ventured into the areas where Astal and their kind lived were usually heavily fortified, or rival scavengers… or desperate and doomed.
The armored and armed spacecraft were more than enough to send an exosiren fleeing. The rivals, scrappers and mining operations, were liable to shoot as well, if they weren’t one of the small number that were not in fact rivals but sometime partners. Astal could deal with rivals if they needed to, although interfering with a ship’s navigation sensors without proper reconnaissance was a risk. But the third possibility, the ships that couldn’t or wouldn’t return to more hospitable ports, well. That was enough to draw Astal out, if cautiously.
So they followed the distress signal, and came upon the pair of tiny spacecraft just as the saucers were starting to drift apart from each other.
Astal pounced on the nearest golden capsule – a silent one, the lights along the outside guttering out. As soon as their hands closed over it, they could feel that most of the craft’s internal systems had shut down already. Fine cracks crazed over one side of the semi-transparent shield that covered the top – Astal couldn’t tell whether the damage was caused by an attack or simply an impact with one of the nearby asteroids, but either way, the tiny form beneath the shield drifted, motionless, and Astal could smell leaked atmosphere, nitrogen and oxygen, in the near-vacuum. Eagerly, they grasped the body of the saucer in one hand and the damaged shield in the other, and twisted it open.
Bits of spacecraft and the lifeless body of the pilot drifted free. Astal was starting to pick around in the inside of the saucer for the water tanks and fuel cell when one of the other saucers, floating so near the siren’s flank now that if Astal had turned too quickly they might have whipped it with their tail, started to cycle up its pitifully tiny engines.
Honestly, the siren had thought that both of the ships – too small for this far out, too delicate for the asteroid field – had been nonfunctional by the time they arrived. Tasting the buzz of radiation from the engines struggling to start, Astal had to amend that to all but nonfunctional. They dropped the dead saucer they’d been scavenging and turned and scooped the crippled one up instead. More carefully now, keeping their fingers clear of the engines.
The figures inside this one were still moving, and tiny, even in comparison to most airbreathers, even in comparison to the dead pilot of the previous craft. Big dark eyes in gray-green faces – Astal was familiar enough with graeys to be pretty sure both of these ones were juveniles. How odd.
Well, they had learned to interface with communications systems on graey vessels. Astal carefully rested the pads of a couple of antennae against the body of the saucer, tried a couple of frequencies until they found one that fit. At this range, there was no question of encoding anything, when they could just tap in directly to the communications hardware.
“Hello?” they said – their voice constructed of carefully distorted white noise. The graey children startled, and the bigger of the two lifted what appeared to be a tiny firearm directly at Astal’s face, making the siren wince back a little and quickly add, “No, don’t, you’ll lose your air.”
She lowered the pistol slightly, uncertainly, grasping the smaller graey to her side with her other hand.
“It talks, Mim,” the littler one said, almost too quietly for the communication system’s microphones to pick her up, and the one with the gun shushed her.
“Your engines won’t get you to the inner system from here,” Astal pointed out. “Where has your houseship gone?”
At the question, the smaller graey started making distressed noises, and the older one, Mim, jammed the pistol back into the belt of her jumpsuit and wrapped both of her arms around the little girl. She glared up through the shield – Astal was pretty sure that narrowed-eye expression was an aggressive one in graeys – and snapped, “What, so you can eat them too?”
“I’m not going to eat you,” Astal objected.
“You broke Dae’s disc right open,” the girl insisted.
Still cupping the craft in both hands, Astal twisted in place, turning so that their body and fins blocked the sight of the cracked-open saucer. “That was already a wreck,” they said. “I’m sorry. I thought you were both wrecked.”
They paused and then asked again, because it was so strange to see even an adult graey separated from her clan, let alone a child, “Where’s the rest of your family gone? I need to give you back.”
“No!” The objection came entirely too quickly, as the girl clutched at the smaller child. She seemed to take a moment to collect herself, and then a little more composed, repeated, “No, don’t.”
“It can eat them if it wants,” the smaller girl muttered.
“Xai, you can’t say that,” Mim scolded, glancing nervously up at Astal.
“Why? They hurt Grandmama and Aunty! They were gonna hurt Mama! That’s why she – why she sent us out here,” the child objected. “The monster can eat the houseship. Serves them right.”
“I’m not going to –“ Astal began to repeat themself, then paused. The reassurances didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of reassuring the children, and honestly, little Xai’s fierceness was kind of endearing. “It’s flattering that you think I could eat a houseship by myself? I don’t think I’d be able to get into it unless the hull was already breached.”
“Oh.” That seemed to take a little of the charge out of the little graey, who turned to hide her face again in her companion’s side.
“It’s our cousins anyway. We can deal with them when we’re old enough,” Mim declared.
Astal blinked slowly down at her. “You’ll need to get old enough first,” they pointed out, although they weren’t sure what the appropriate age to pursue what sounded like some kind of kinslaying revenge ploy would be. “You’ll suffocate before you get to an inhabited planet if I leave you here. I have friends – ship-people friends. Ones that aren’t graeys. Can I ask one of them to take you?”
Mim hesitated, perhaps still suspicious of the siren’s intentions, but she was sensible enough to accept Astal’s assessment of her situation. “Ok. No tricks though.”
“None,” Astal promised, considering who might be near enough to come take charge of the little graeys. The Typhoon had been working a wreckfield not far away, they were pretty sure; if any of their scavenger friends could be trusted with a pair of random children, it was the pair of gregariously pack-bond prone aliens that flew her. “Can you authorize an outgoing transmission for me? I’ll use your coms to hail my friend.”
“And if you do eat us, eat Mim first,” Xai piped up, as the older girl fussed with the com controls.
Astal waved a free antenna in exasperation. “I don’t eat people.”