Chapter 2 - Some Casual Bleeding

Hostiles alep/bet/gim lost contact:not following. Good. New track… Object:terrain:thing?:ship. Enemy. Provide control of systems. Please provide control of systems.

Hand over control of systems Enemy is a threat please. Fear. Fear:unusual:uncomfortable:want to run:want to escape.

Let go. Let me go. Fear. I want this?:No:yes?:...

I am afraid.

Did the plants really have to take so long?

Cass almost laughed at her own impatience. In the wake of the pursuit and the frankly improbable number of times she had just defied death, she ought to have welcomed a moment’s rest. If she’d known just how this was going to go, she would have at least taken a nap first. Even setting aside the exhaustion that ached in every bone, tissue, and thought, it wasn’t as if she was eager to be hauled away for domestication, experimentation, or whatever fate her ‘salvation’ deemed warranted.

Still, she hadn’t expected said salvation to welcome her with a staring contest. Come on, she thought, only barely too tired to fidget anxiously in her seat. Let’s get it over with.

And then, there was the other matter. Cass winced as she shifted in her restraint harness, looking down towards her abdomen, where she’d kept a hand firmly pressed since the chase concluded. She pulled it away, noting that the splotches of warm, wet crimson had only soaked deeper into her gloves. “It’s fine,” she mumbled at nobody, “Keep me waiting. I probably have enough blood left for it.”

Ah. That was more on her flight-suit than she expected.

“...Probably.”

Her self-deprecating snort was interrupted with a chime that she’d very nearly forgotten about. “Right. Fuck. Sorry, Blue.” She twisted, attempting to reach for the stowed display, before another spike of pain shot up her spine, sluggish and scalding like liquid lead. “I, ah, don’t think I can get you out right now. But don’t worry.” Her arm bent just far enough to pat the edge of the panel. “We’re fine. We made it. Just gotta wait for them to get their asses in gear.”

Another ping.

“I’m gonna assume you’re either thanking me profusely, or complimenting me on my absolutely ravishing piloting skills.” She let out another laugh, immediately regretting it as it poured another river of lead into her flesh. “If you’re complaining, please direct it to the megalomaniacal plant people. Now lemme rest for a bit, alright?”

The machine chimed angrily, this time - the same tone, but five times in rapid succession. Cass didn’t need to see the screen to guess what it said. “Alright, alright, fine, no sleep. Just… a little less talking. It kinda hurts, you know.”

One ping. She took that to mean Blue was satisfied.

A couple minutes more of reading off of the few displays that weren't dead or jammed, in a bored struggle to stay awake, and at last her weary vessel began to diverge from its now-ballistic trajectory. She wasn’t entirely sure how - the plants didn’t have tractor beams or something, did they? - until, from the lower edge of a still-functioning display, the outer casing of some sort of drone poked up from beneath the hull. Its chassis was rounded, with a slightly flattened bottom, almost as if someone had made a cartoonish representation of a friendly beetle, and splashed it in whites and pinks. At its front, a set of four lights blinked like inquisitive eyes looking upon a new friend, and just behind and to the side, what Cass could only presume was a sensor dish blossomed out in the shape of a flower pinned to the drone’s head.

She wasn’t going to like it. She was not going to like it. She absolutely, under no circumstances whatsoever, was going to show affection for something so clearly a tool of the species that had conquered and domesticated her people. Especially not one that had doubtless dragged dozens of hapless Terran vessels into the gaping maws of Affini warships, pretty little lights blinking all the while as those doomed rebels tried in vain to-

Oh, hell, why did it have to be so cute?

“Come on, little… drone… thing. Nothing to see here. Just some casual bleeding.”

She hadn’t expected a response. The radio chirped, and Cassiopeia jumped, immediately wincing as the sudden movement pressed the restraints further into her wound. As the pain ebbed away, she turned the transmission volume up with a shaky hand, before clicking the tactile switch that let it through.

“Hi again!” Came that same saccharine voice from before. Dirt. She’d have had an easier time talking to the drone. “Thank you for being so patient for us, sweetie! We’d have been along sooner, but, hmpf…”

Was that a pout? Did Affini pout? Cass tried to imagine it, projecting a petulant expression onto the nightmarish representations plastered into every propaganda reel. Again, she deemed her imagination insufficient to visualize something so ridiculous.

The Affini - Captain Ameminie, she supposed, mouthing it thrice before she stopped hearing it as anemone - continued on, entirely oblivious to her distraction. “Those rebels that were chasing you, they tried to break off, and the poor things must have accidentally put themselves on a collision course with the planet. We had to make sure that nobody got hurt, of course, and don’t worry - they’re alright now!”

Don’t worry? Cass found herself glaring at the radio, in lieu of anything more tangible to express her frustration with. She’d be perfectly justified to not care in the first place - hadn’t they all been trying to kill her a few minutes ago? More than that, though, the frustration was born of guilt. The Affini had helped them. She knew what that meant, for their future, for their freedom. Try as she might to shrug it off as the consequences of their own actions, they’d have never been here if not for her.

She could guess at the ones that she’d condemned to their fates. Jessine, without a doubt. Even setting aside how distinctive her ship was, with the trifurcated missile racks around the nose, her flying had dispelled the notion that anyone but Jessine was behind its stick. Cass had expected as much when she left - anyone who knew Jessine wouldn’t expect her to let someone get away with breaking her heart. Of all of Cassiopeia’s crimes, that was the one she could least justify.

The memory tasted bitter as a berry synthcube, and it took a modicum of will not to dwell on it. Who else? Callow definitely wanted her head, but in that she was no different than half the human race. Ryxa? Probably. She didn’t even know why the diminutive Rinan was still with them, preparing for a fight they’d never win in a backwater so far from home. The rest of xer species had stopped resisting the day the Accord nuked their homeworld. Stockholm syndrome, probably. That, and Callow’s constant threats to flay any of them that ‘went soft’.

…Maybe he, at least, was better off being in Affini hands. Tendrils. Whatever.

The rest, though? The Affini wouldn’t look at the people they’d been. They’d just see the arms her comrades - her friends - had taken up, and decide they all were much better off as brainfucked pets. It wouldn’t take long, from what she’d heard. They’d probably have Owners within the day. In a week, Cass would probably see them, and by then they wouldn’t even hate her for what she’d done to them.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, to nobody in particular, but by then it wasn’t even for her betrayal. It wasn’t for what her friends would lose. It wasn’t for what they would become. No, Cassiopeia was sorry because ultimately, for all the guilt, the fear, the repression, and years of Terran propaganda? She was alright with this.

Cassiopeia had made her peace with what she was destined to become. To her, that felt like the greatest betrayal of all.

Scale became a strange thing with distance. At a thousand kilometers, the Cylina’s Mantle had seemed a leviathan, even against the impossible scale of the gas giant. Now, as Cass drew closer, she hardly processed its size at all. It wasn't ‘enormous beyond comprehension,’ it simply was. Once, some years ago, before the word Affini was anything but the unfortunate name of a synth-orchestral group about to be banished to the hundredth page of search results, she’d heard a girl talk about living in the shadow of a mountain. Cass imagined that it must have felt something like this, standing in the shadow of something so immense that one failed to see it as a distinct object any longer, and rather as an extension of the fabric of one’s world.

The closest she’d ever come to seeing a mountain was the solar-wind-blasted cliffs of Gliese-588-2, looming some thirty stories high, and even stacked a hundred times atop themselves, they wouldn’t have reached from the pistil to the first ring-bloom. So, Cass stopped trying to understand what she was seeing, and simply resigned herself to accepting it for what it was - the impossible made reality.

The drones, entirely impassive to her awe, maneuvered her into a corridor behind layers of parted leafen material, invisible to her eye until it had revealed itself. A hangar bay laid at the mouth of it, clearly able to accommodate ships a dozen times her size, and already playing host to all five of the slender interceptors that had pursued her. They looked almost comically small, not merely against the expanse of the hangar, but in contrast to the two Affini ships pressed up against the far end of the chamber - shuttles, Terran intelligence had once reluctantly disclosed, and yet comparable in scale to true warships of humanity.

A spot had been reserved for her, opposite the hangar from the five interceptors, with a fair bit of space cleared out around it. A pedestal of honor, for the traitor. Around it, several more of the pink floral drones were hovering on call, ready to catch her vessel and anchor it to the deck.

And then, there they were. Verdant tangles speckled with bark and buttercup, floral pastels and petals that seemed to glow like neon, tendrils woven in elaborate patterns or left to hang loosely as if they’d just climbed out of whatever absurdly oversized bed they’d slept in. The Affini were waiting for her, and they seemed delighted.

One in particular had woven herself into some sort of trellis, taking on an uncannily human shape, and blooming with what might well have been terrestrial lavender. She seemed hardly able to contain herself, lingering right up against the edge of the clearly-marked exhaust zone. That one, then? Cass wondered. That’s the one that’s going to be my Owner? She felt oddly detached about the idea. Had she already lost even the last vestiges of panic, or was it just the blood loss?

She looked down, and stared dumbly for another second at the glistening murk on her clothes. Yep. Definitely the blood loss.

If there was a bright side, it was that she barely felt the pain as the ship settled to a stop, and what she did was not from the perfectly-gentle landing but the automatic relaxing of her safety harness, taking further pressure off the wound. She was tempted to pull it back on, to wrap it around her like some sort of rigid metal blanket. Stars, when did it get so chilly in the cockpit? She had been boiling all day, the ill-maintained cooling systems not quite able to keep up with the heat of her electronics.

Now, though, all she wanted to do was curl up beneath a blanket, get nice and warm and cozy, and just get some sleep…

She blinked heavily, belatedly processing a familiar chime. “It’s fine, Blue… We’re here. I’m just gonna get a bit of shut-eye, that’s all…”

Stars, why did Blue sound so angry? The display just wouldn’t shut up. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ha. Joke was on Blue, because she could sleep anyway.

Cassiopeia only dimly processed the sound of twisting metal, and not even the ear-piercing screech of her hatch being torn away could fully rouse her. Light shone through it, and she squinted, before a shadow cast its way lazily over her. Cass smiled, grateful for the being blocking out the light, and dully wiggled her fingers in greeting. It wiggled too - was it waving back? Cass let out a giggle, and let her eyes slip shut.

Already, she was falling, not keen to resist a rest more desperately needed than any in her life. She was still cold, so cold, but then came warmth, all around her. It swathed her body like a blanket of a hundred tendrils, cocooning her, tucking her peacefully in. She was so warm. So sleepy. What more could she possibly want?

Aculiata kept her distance as Lysanthae opened the hatch, quietly envying the assuredness with which she moved. Certainly, Lysanthae was eager, secondary vocal strands humming with excitement in a range far above most beings’ hearing. She knew that she was going to find a floret out of this, and from the looks of it, possibly an eager one. Meanwhile, Aculiata had been left to stand and watch, trying to helpfully insert herself where possible. Mulch, if I wanted to help rescue humans, I should’ve put myself on a warship.

It wasn’t as if she’d come planning to take a floret. Certainly, it might be nice to have one, but was she really ready for it? Besides that…

She glanced up towards Lysanthae, and a pair of her vines suddenly intertwined as she grew flustered. Her experience thus far wouldn’t exactly lend itself towards taking the floret.

Even so, it was hard not to feel restless, as the other Affini had gone about the rescues. Five of the rebels - four humans and a rinan, for some stars-forsaken reason - had already been brought aboard, sedated, and taken away to medical for preliminary examinations. Aculiata would bet a day of grooming work that at least one had already been quietly claimed. Meanwhile, Lysanthae seemed to have this last one well in hand. She’d already buried herself halfway into the cockpit, no doubt working against those impossible restraining harnesses meant to keep human pilots from ejecting.

“Oh, she’s such a pretty one, Culi!” Lysanthae called, at a frequency well within the human range of hearing. “Hello there, lovely little thing! Do you have a name?”

Was it even possible for Lysanthae to quell that aura of superiority she perpetually exuded? Aculiata didn’t know, and most of the time, didn’t care to find out. That voice always left her tendrils curling. Still, she hoped it didn’t scare the poor dear. The floret-to-be had been through quite a day, after all.

“Darling?” She heard Lysanthae repeat. “Cutie? Can you- Ohhhh. Oh dirt.”

From inside the cockpit came more rustling of vines and leaves, and once again, the sound of twisting metal. Lysanthae began to cast any possible obstructions from the hatch, scattering them about the hangar floor, restraining harness, bulky displays, and warped metal alike. Seconds later, she emerged in a flurry of motion, her adorable new human cradled in her tendrils.

Stars, the human really was a pretty one. Her hair was oily and mussed, her gray flight-suit unflattering, and yet it was plain to see her appeal. That oily hair framed her face in deep brown locks and bangs, like chestnut lit only by distant stars. Her skin, dirty from restrictions on washing, had the tone of warm amber, having barely settled into solid form and speckled with the beautiful accents of nature. A subtle musculature was visible beneath, especially in her shoulders, where they swept wide behind a sharply-defined collarbone. She boasted a strong jaw, the best kind to watch slacken in hazy acceptance, and slender lips that would no doubt curve into the most blissful and petlike of smiles. Her cheeks looked to have a rosy undertone, one that would make for a wonderful little blush if the woman were to have a little more blood in her body.

That, indeed, was the source of Lysanthae’s concern, as the human’s stomach was covered in an entirely-concerning quantity of it.

“Right, ah, Culi,” Lysanthae said as if the urgency of the situation had only now struck her - which in all likelihood, it had - “I need to get this darling thing to medical before this wound gives her any trouble. Do you mind if I…”

Aculiata waved her along with a flame-tinted flower. “Go, silly. Take care of your new cutie.”

Already moving towards the door, Lysanthae paused for but a second, calling back with a rhetorical deflection. “Who said that I’m taking this one for myself, now?”

Culi laughed a more mirthful laugh, a rustle of leaves overlying a hum like a violin’s low G. “I do, darling, and if you don’t, I’m going to be terribly disappointed, for the sake of the cutie missing out on it.” Lysanthae began to say something in protest, and Aculiata found a pinch of selfish mirth in how the urgency of the situation served her. “Argue later,” she insisted, waving the flame-tipped tendril along again. “Go!”

Unable to justify lingering when her floret-to-be was in need of care, Lysanthae conceded the debate. She unraveled from her trellises, spread vines wide to seek hardpoints across the walls, and began to hurdle at now-unrestrained speeds towards the most immediately convenient medical department. Aculiata watched her go, only sagging the tiniest bit as the last sprig of lavender slipped out of view.

Lucky little floret, she couldn’t help but think. The faint warmth of compersion welled up in her core, as she imagined the dear a few weeks from now, so content on Lysanthae’s leash. And she doesn’t even know yet what a wonderful owner she’s found.

Aculiata let the warmth settle, dwelling on how nice it must be to be in both of their places. There was a twinge of envy, certainly, in the back of her mind, which she acknowledged, accepted, and let go. It wasn’t anything inherently wrong to feel, and past experience had proven that this wouldn’t change anything for the worse. Ultimately, she was happy for the floret, and delighted for the new experiences Lysa would find in her.

As the minutes passed, and she declared her feelings fully sorted through, Aculiata found herself wishing it had taken her longer to do so. The bustle in the hangar had died down, and while she wasn’t alone in it, the few Affini left were either poking around at the crude Terran ships, or already nestled into their cliques and developing the latest gossip. Given the lack of an available clique to settle into, though she doubted any would be unwelcoming, Aculiata decided to task herself with the former.

She slipped away from the sharp-edged, asymmetrical vessel for just a moment, gathering up the trellises that Lysa had left behind, and making a mental note to return them to her later. It would be a good excuse to check up on her and her floret, anyhow. With those tucked safely away among her vines, she began to circle the ship, trying not to be too judgemental about what Terrans considered cutting-edge engineering.

The poor thing wasn’t in terribly good shape, was it? That much stayed true even excusing the shrapnel-holes that riddled the hull like an overused bulletin board, or the communications relays that appeared to have been sheared clean off. Panels of the hull were bleached from solar radiation, metal was warped in several places not from sudden impacts but repetitive stress, and the sheer amount of dried lubricant caked around the thrust vectoring panels suggested that whoever had maintained this craft had needed to preserve the ball bearings well past their replacement date. Aculiata only had a hobbyist’s background in mechanics, as with virtually any other skill, but depending on the state of these rebels’ supplies, she had either some very stern or sympathetic words for the mechanic that did this.

The cockpit wasn’t in any better shape, though Lysa was at least partly to blame for it. Frost, they expected a pilot to fly in that? Aculiata shuddered, imagining the human being sealed in that seat with barely enough room to wiggle a finger, much less stretch her legs. Half the displays were shot, either quite literally or by electrical surges and thermal overloads, leaving anyone sitting behind them with more blind spots than vision, and what sensor systems were still functional updated in scrambled, jittery sweeps. At least the cockpit had maintained power at all, she thought, until she found the burnt husks of the lithium batteries right beneath where the pilot would rest her feet. Punctured, of course.

A quick check confirmed that the reactor was still running, and was all that was keeping the lights on. Right, she probably didn’t want to leave a human reactor running in their hangar for too long, even if it weren’t at risk of destabilizing itself. There had to be a convenient cockpit switch for that, right?

As it turns out, there was, and it was lying among the rest of the debris that Lysanthae had carelessly torn out. No matter, she could stem it from the source, if she could find the reactor access panel. Culi allowed herself a moment to pine for one of the tendrils she’d engineered during her hobbyist reactor building days, that she could have easily used to trace down the location of highest irradiation. She’d built such interesting tools for that. Why had she stopped, again?

Lacking that, she contented herself with a nearby scanner, which immediately began to buzz in her grasp. Culi checked the display, winced, and quickly scribbled out a message to Lysa, reminding her to check the human for radiation poisoning, and likely administer oncological agents. Upon receiving confirmation, she dove back into the cramped confines, digging around again for the reactor access hatch.

She couldn’t help but grow a little frustrated at how obtuse they’d made it to find. It wasn’t under the floor, there were no clear markings, and everything inside was coated in a thick enough blanket of radiation that it could’ve baked a cake. She was on the verge of leaving in search of a more sensitive tool, when her attention was drawn by a small chime off to her side.

Curious. All of the sensor displays, system readouts, and other occasionally beeping devices had been in front of the seat, and she’d taken the time to silence them one by one during her search. How many more did this have, and what masochistic fool had decided not to install a master mute switch? “Come on, little chime, where are you? Let’s get you shut down to rest.” A web of extremely fine tendrils began to string itself across the cockpit, as Aculiata repurposed her vocal strands into a delicate, precise listening net. They all hummed with the faint buzz of the reactor, but she tuned that out, letting it fade into the background in the same way she fell into Lysanthae’s voice. Her world was too far away to notice. Her world was still.

Plip!

There it was! Aculiata pulled herself together with the snap of a contracting elastic band, whipping around to face the pilot’s seat and the source of the noise. Pushing the seat off its bolts, she wrapped her tendril around the source - a small monitor on a swiveling metal arm, the display shattered by a four-millimeter pellet hole. Some part of her was tempted to rip it from the arm, granting her the satisfaction of complete silence in an improperly brutal way, but the urge was hardly strong enough to call it one at all. This ship might have mattered to someone, after all. The least she could do was be respectful of it.

Flipping the display over, she checked the cables, and was disappointed to find that they weren’t designed to just be pulled out. They were soldered in without a proper connector, with the same sloppy haste as the arm the display was affixed to. Really, she thought, the whole thing looked quite jury-rigged - what was its purpose, even?

She followed the cable, more out of curiosity than any further annoyance at the sound, where they seemed to lead back through a roughly-drilled hole in the rear bulkhead. No, she realized, more than a bulkhead - the plate they’d been strung through was an access panel, not marked in any way, but faintly delineated by the groove in the metal. Finally!

She did her best not to disturb the cords as she slipped her tendrils into the crevasse, and began to tug gently - and then more insistently, as it refused to budge - until the panel finally groaned and popped free. She set it aside, pulled herself tighter, and tried to press into the narrow space to permit herself a closer look.

As she took in the cramped space, just barely tall enough for a human to hunch in, Aculiata found herself briefly uncertain of what she was looking at. What she was certain of, though, was that it was definitely not the reactor.

Webs of cables lined the walls, tied in tight bundles where there was the opportunity, but mostly left to lay in whatever tangle had been most convenient. They sprung from and flowed into stacks upon stacks of silicon, a tower of interconnected boxes separated by overworked pumps and near-boiling reservoirs. Lights both steady and flashing dotted the chassis, the only illumination in the chamber save for the pale black screen of a fifteen-centimeter terminal. They shone most prominently where they converged, forming two opposing chevrons near the top and bottom of the central stack that glowed a slowly-pulsing iris blue.

Aculiata stared into the eye of the machine, and the machine blinked.

Hello, plant, the terminal at the base of the tower read. Do you intend to domesticate me, too?